Out of the darkness they come, like Orpheus blinking into the light, or that mob of dead souls called up by Odysseus to drink from a puddle of blood. The subjects of these photographs are all, or most of them, ghosts by now. But when Donald Blumberg made these visual records at the front of St. Patrick’s Cathedral in New York between 1965 and 1967, the ancient usages of veil and formality that once marked the Catholic faithful were still intact. The black door behind these figures is not simply a backdrop for their brightness; it is the place from where they carry mysteries out into the ordinary light of day, saints and martyrs disguised as window shoppers. But they are changed, some as by a tilted mirror in God’s fun house, slightly askew and doubled, with the sequence of their movement constructed in the style of the early Renaissance painter Giovanni di Paolo where both time and space shift within a single frame. For others, a blur of movement leaves only the starkest badges of identity, such as a nun’s black and white habit, recognizable. The boundary line between sacred and secular is here indistinct and pliable, with the memory of an antique ritual carried by each of its singular witnesses out into the rush of the present.

In these pictures, Blumberg is an archivist of mundane mysteries; those brief, unguarded moments of revelation on a crowded sidewalk. But he performs a similar task in his collection of images from newspaper pages and television screens. These are experiments in stopping time, with the random and puerile instants which Blumberg records serving as a means of exposing the essential nonsense of the system which treasures them. Under the general heading of “In Their Own Words” given to them by the artist, photographs of TV stills with their closed captioned texts document the arbitrariness of language in a world gorged on images. There is an essential disconnect apparent here; any words might be applied to any of these pictures. And while they can be encountered as distinct and individual works, each of the series that they make up is an argument readable as a whole.

And so, there is the catalog of visual temptations on the sales channels like QVC with its jewelry advertisements, and rulers laid next to pearls in apparent diminishing contradiction of their magnified splendor on the screen. Soap opera myths, fragments of evangelical oratory, real estate offerings that define houses as trophies, and televised poker tournaments with wagers which reach the millions of dollars, all are variations on the suspect American dream. And in a sequence entitled “Before and After,” Blumberg presents transformations of physical appearance as a series of unintentionally comic instructions on achieving conformity with what is the public norm. All of these are exquisitely illustrative of what the Jesuit poet and activist Daniel Berrigan described in our society as “the absurd cacophony of competing claims, the culture of noise, inadvertence, distraction.”

The images drawn from newspaper pages raise a paradoxical question: are these more or less ephemeral made into an independent photograph? Removed from both the context of the printed object and the library periodical room, these are now nostalgic objects, even though they show us to be careful historians of all our atrocities. In one frame, the arc of violence includes the photo of a soldier in Vietnam who, the caption notes, was wounded immediately after the picture was taken, printed beneath a fragment reporting fires and gunshots in the streets of Belfast. Several of Blumberg’s choices of subject document the slaughter of civilians at My Lai in 1969 and its aftermath. But here, an image of the corpses heaped in ditches still breaks through with its resemblance to present horrors.​We have not come far, and so, there is an essential melancholy to all of this work. The most recent narrative that Blumberg freezes into individual frames is the mass murder at the elementary school in Newtown, CT, three years ago. As time has passed, these images now document the useless attempt to find meaning in the event, or to inspire a change of attitudes towards gun violence in this country, even with a picture of the president in tears. It is possible that Blumberg has seen more of the world's unsettling truths than he ever wanted to, but he persists in his photography, knowing that there are those who have not yet seen enough of them.

The wreckage is confined as if were a crime scene display, solitary in a warehouse, awaiting the jury’s visit. This the antechamber to the installation of work by Anselm Kiefer now in place at MASS MoCA for the coming decade. The building on the former factory complex that was converted to house it was once a water storage tank for nearby boilers, and there is a sense of a pool having been drained to reveal these still decaying fragments on the floor, now making their long return to dust. The 2002 work entitled Étroits sont les Vaisseaux (Narrow are the Vessels), with its protruding rebar, suggests the fossilized remains of an unknown species of monster, exhumed by some puzzled scientist. Or it is the once animated rubble of a broken assembly line, where some death-making industry assembled its brutal gadgets. There are sheets of lead that cleave to the concrete as if some preposterous war memorial had been wrecked, its inscriptions now melted by fire into something indecipherable, but evoking the despair promised by Shelley’s Ozymandias to all those deluded by the arrogance of power. Kiefer’s confrontation with a German past, defined by state violence ending in a wasteland, reaches into our present where the same definition still operates, and our willingness to tolerate it grows more and more refined.

In the gallery which runs parallel and behind this one, rows of beds are arranged as they might have been in a ward of the asylum where the Marquis De Sade produced his plays. The Women of the Revolution (Les Femmes de la Révolution), a work begun in 1992 and extending over the next eleven years, with the poisonous lead here melded to both frames and absent bodies which have left their relic traces in multiple forms, is a series of variations on the legend of Procrustes where the occupants are tortured to fit the couches they lie upon. But these sleepers have been turned to stone and water and rust and dead flowers and a drowned palette where the paint has become strands of metal thread. This is the hospital of history that we all still live in, documents of a revolution which led to the extermination camps, with a large painted panel on the far wall of the space depicting the back of a uniformed figure walking along a barbed wire fence. You cannot see the murderer’s face; you would never recognize him in the street. He could be anyone. Us. This is exactly the point.

And where, then, inside this stark architecture of of human failing is there a sign of consolation? The enclosed room at the opposite end of the building might suggest that possibility. There is an immediate echo of something brighter, more convinced of salvation as well as damnation, in the shape of this space given over to Kiefer’s assemblage of paintings with the single title of Velimir Chlebnikov, from 2004. That would be Giotto’s Scrovegni Chapel in Padua with its certainties of order and meaning and glory, but here inverted to read as a catalogue of mechanical slaughter, inspired by the Russian Futurist poet who envisioned endless cycles of naval warfare, and whose name gives the work its title. These panels are ruins of water, tainted by the underwater weapons they hide. The ocean is thick, stained by oil and burning, its gross floral decorations an evocation of those sunken wreaths thrown from the decks of warships by grieving families in memory of drowned fathers.

But the silence being broken here is not just concerning conflicts that have ended long ago. As I write this, and as you read it, there are intercontinental ballistic missile submarines capable of effectively erasing all human life quietly moving in deep waters off one coast or another. They are oxymorons of beauty and mass murder. We never think of their existence. Yet they hold everything which we pretend to treasure at risk. That is why to stand here with these paintings is both gift and punishment. Kiefer knows better than any other artist of our time that hope is not allowed to forget the past that puts it in jeopardy; and that hope is not allowed to lie about the darkness now.

Thoreau heard trains in Walden. There is the recorded sound of one in the exhibition Walden, revisited, on view through April 26 at deCordova Sculpture Park and Museum, but there is nothing to suggest that it is anything other than a modern intrusion, rather than a report of Thoreau’s own experience. A rail line ran not far from his cabin. “The whistle of the locomotive penetrates my woods summer and winter,” he writes in Walden, “sounding like the scream of a hawk sailing over some farmer's yard...” Although his simile tries to draw the machine into nature, there is a a lack of conviction to it, as if he felt obligated to make the attempt, but knew that it would not succeed. In any case, he was seeking a moral woods, not an authentic one. Paradise had already been lost by the time he reached it.

But the fantasies of Thoreau’s experience are a matter of continuing obsession in a culture that is not yet sure what to make of the natural world beyond either romance or betrayal. Curated with a keen sense for diverse voices by Dina Deitsch, this collection of work by sixteen artists at a site only a few miles from its geographical subject, directly confronts that ambiguity. In her ingenuously comic video piece One Week Walden, Jennifer Sullivan cheerfully asserts of her encounter with the book that “I didn’t actually finish it, but I got the basic idea.” That statement can easily serve as our cultural common denominator regarding Thoreau.

There is a tradition of commentary which imagines Thoreau’s work as a lyrical science project, set apart by its antique botanical categories. This is the character of Spencer Finch’s Walden Pond (surface/depth). Fashioned in the form of a lead line used by sailors to measure shallow water, it becomes a Linnaean rope on land with its twisting, imaginary catalogue of specimens. Finch also created a collage of Impressionist postcards that are presented as documentary equivalents to his own visual mapping of the Walden Pond surface on a single morning. As a dictionary of light it is an imaginative rendering, but these particular choices suggest other possibilities. Corot and Millet were reading the sun at the same time as Thoreau was and knew the hard details of the landscape as he did. Even Edward Hopper and his wanderers in urban sunlight would recognize the water’s unstable mirror.

Gina Siepel’s rowboat in primary colors meant for resurveying Walden Pond hints at something precious in attitude that Thoreau never possessed, although Rat and Mole rowing along the river in The Wind in the Willows are perhaps the closest in spirit to a children’s version of Walden that there is, especially with its Greek mythology thrown in. It is Jane Marsching with Matthew Shanley who, by inscribing a history of ice using graphs of cold, is the more enlightening about the pond’s surfaces, even as they are reduced to abstractions.

Deb Todd Wheeler’s video, Searching for Imposters, imagines the submerged, invisible stories of the pond, with her billowing plastic bags a suggestion of Ophelia drowning in Walden, while the floating black cabin of William Lamson’s untitled image might be the ghost of Huck and Jim’s raft left to drift into the dark future of race in this country.

A work of the Futurefarmers collective entitled We have become the tool of our tools presents a log branded with an ax, an image which appears to render a tree capable of its own unmaking. This could be read as a counterpoint to the poet Audre Lorde’s assertion that, in the pursuit of justice, “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” Here, instead, is the tool that the master could use to demolish every house except his own. In another piece by the same group, Solitude Friendship Society, are the words enclosed in the wood really its own voice, or rather what it is being forced to say of itself?

Myopic Wall Composition, by David Brooks, is a dissection of Nature into architectural elements. Displayed on an armature like those used to support anatomical models, it belongs in a morgue for the woods. Lisa Sigal’s Hinged Painting (Freshkills), uses window screens to filter the trash and muck of the landfill into a dream site for Thoreau’s cabin, to be rebuilt within the confines of an anti-Walden, the dump returned to nature.

In a recent New York Times essay entitled “Leaving Only Footsteps,” the writer Christopher Solomon argues convincingly that even our most benign intrusions into nature (and they are rarely only that) result in disaster. Oscar Palacio’s photographs included in this exhibition could serve as the precise illustrations of that discovery. He traces the human in fragments left behind, some resembling the debris of a kidnapping, or a prison escape, underlining that peculiar paradox of nature’s reality being heightened in the presence of trash. And then there are the athletes who have made the circuit of Walden a place of physical exercise, running after immortality. Palacio follows in their trail with a video essay that marks each of his steps with a single frame, realizing the simple mystery of a landscape that can never be known in all its details, no matter how deliberately one moves through it.

There is an exercise in the absurd that attaches to all of Thoreau. MIchael Mercil imagines a version of Thoreau’s desk (requires some assembly) which can produce a series of various outcomes, inheriting the altered instructions for the building of Buster Keaton’s doomed Cubist house in the film One Week. In another of her collaborations, this one with Monika Sziladi, Gina Siepel finds a self-conscious, innocent comedy in a “portrait of the artist” series of caricatures that read as harmless versions of what Cindy Sherman would have made unsettling. With her deadpan conclusion that “it seemed very boring to watch someone thinking for a long time,”Jennifer Sullivan speaks in a way of which Thoreau would have thoroughly approved. With a Walden pond swimming pool in her father’s back yard, where the heaps of odd junk have obviously found their natural surroundings, she still registers the accidental beauty of rain falling into the colorful piece of inflated plastic. Her work also owes something to the silent film tradition, as in the scene from Modern Times at the shack where Charlie Chaplin finds sanctuary, with its nearby pond that turns out to be only six inches deep when he dives into it for a swim. Walden may never be deep enough to hold the distortions which have attached to it, comic and otherwise

For there is a darkness in these galleries, as well. James Benning’s Two Cabins (Kaczynski/Thoreau ) addresses the inevitable comparisons between Thoreau’s cabin and the one which belonged to the Unabomber. The video work displayed through two window openings allows a viewer’s own shadow to cross into the frame, establishing an immediate sense of complicity with the invisible residents. Looking from the inside out, we are reminded of our usual perspective on the natural world which we often register as a still photograph because of our lack of patience for watching. But it is the subtleties of motion in this work which define it; it becomes a movie only when we are at our most attentive. And in an exhibition which greatly depends upon environments of sound, the whirl of noise that accompanies this particular video sequence makes all the change it registers audible, but incomprehensible. Except for the intrusion of one modern machine, we have only the most general categories of “bird” and “wind,” but in what tree does that particular wind make that particular sound? This is the shared world of the murderer and the naturalist, where “God sends rain upon the just and unjust like.”

Compare this to the film by William Cordova , untitled (mosaic of different origins). Here the blurred focus creates a visual time machine that allows the past to appear even as it is accompanied by overlaid sounds of the present. Cordova is also responsible for a series of collages which register as relics from what could be imagined as Thoreau’s secret journals, meant to be destroyed, but somehow salvaged in all their damaged splendor. In them, willful misspellings, the censor’s black pencil, and the brutality beneath the gilded surface of society, all leave their traces of a man like Thoreau, desperate to keep his conscience alive.

This is one of those exhibitions for which it is best to be in good company while moving through it, sharing the moments of bleak recognition that there is no way to trace the changes that most mattered to Thoreau, and sharing the laughter that keeps us hopeful, each time that paradise is lost again .

The Living and the Dead

[published August, 2014, Artes]

Bruce Davidson/Paul Caponigro: Two American Photographers in Britain and IrelandYale Center for British Art, New Haven, CT

Here is the surprise: a pure and unexpected delight in having an expectation shattered. It was with an unquestioned confidence that I walked into this exhibition knowing which of the two photographers would matter most to me. But I was wrong.

And I needed only one image to realize this.

Here was a hanging tree turned to play, the child executioner in the foreground, like a scene from a darkened Midsummer Night’s Dream, or a post-crucifixion Calvary now a playground for the last few straggling bystanders. The horizon is askew, with one or two ghost houses in the distance sheltering the privileged from this ordinary, unnerving moment.

This was what Bruce Davidson found in Wales during a 1965 visit there. Carrying with him the earlier documentary experiences he had of Brooklyn gangs and East Harlem tenement life, he brought his essential sympathy into this equally unfamiliar world.

There is another image of a child, here pushing a baby carriage in what seems a conventional pose. But isn’t this a boy in revolt, as if poised to escape with his imagination from the industrial murk, the white sheets hanging in defiance rather than surrender? A different sense of possibility than that evident in the picture of a bride and groom trapped in the land of chimneys and cooling towers. Both images could serve as ironic illuminations to the popular hymn “Jerusalem,” with its mythical assurances from William Blake of heaven made on British earth.

His eye for children is unerring; here is a bus full of them: a school trip or an evacuation; to safety or to disaster? There is one singing in a cemetery where the flowers are carved in stone, and another besieged by pigeons in what might be an outtake from a lost Alfred Hitchcock film. The young are older in a photograph of a sideshow Dante’s Inferno looming over them, as if they were doomed innocents wandering into Pinocchio’s fateful amusement park. A line of boys brandishing sticks suggests the Lord of the Flies held just barely at bay, even close to town.

On an earlier trip in 1960, Davidson discovered in Brighton the orderly universe invented by a lawn bowling society of women. Their nearly uniform garb appears a requirement of the game’s plot, with the individual variations in dress clear, but not eccentric. As they meditate on the position of the bowls, their postures are all grace.

He finds the same grace in a worker on a Scottish pier, her apron spattered with fish scales, whose whole life is revealed on her face in this one moment, and again in a woman wearing hat and coat at the beach, carrying her sensible shoes above the surf, kicking her dreams into foam. And once again, in St. Paul’s Cathedral, with his subject staring at her future in the face of a carved tomb effigy, where he invents Eleanor Rigby in advance of the song.

How different this all is from Paul Caponigro’s work on view here where, with only two exceptions (one of a half dozen children reads like either an accident or a bribe offered as a way of forcing them to abandon the scene; the other of a single figure who provides scale to what might otherwise be a confusing subject), the world is emptied of the human present.

As a result, an unexpected question arises: can an image be too perfect? The Stonehenge photographs are so precise in their reflections, their shadows, that they betray a psychological rather than a mechanical manipulation. We are confronted with the artist’s sense of arrogance declaring that “I alone have seen this.”

It is true that we can never know what these remains actually were. The only faithful response to them at our point in time is not the experience of them, but the impossibility of experiencing them - their impenetrability. But Caponigro is uncomfortable with the ways in which his subjects are absolutely empty. He is certainly not alone in finding such alienation hard to bear; it is difficult to leave the mystery alone. And he is not solely responsible for turning Stonehenge into a formal cliché, (his images of a site such as Avebury are more compelling by being less recognizable; in one of his most evocative, a tree at that site seems as ancient as the standing stone next to it). And his photograph of Cormac’s Chapel in Ireland is a moving recollection, in both light and subject, of Frederick Evans’ 1903 image of the stone steps at Wells Cathedral.

But, in the end, all of Caponigro’s judgments are purely aesthetic; an abstraction removed from ordinary experience. He is the opposite of Davidson, not merely in subject, but in matters of kinship. Davidson finds something he recognizes in everything; Caponigro nothing. Even in a line of bearskin hatted Irish Guards making their mechanical way along a park, Davidson the discovers the human gaze in both a soldier and a bystander. There is self-congratulation in Caponigro; generosity in Davidson. He is an inheritor of Whitman who sees himself in everyone:

And such as it is to be of these more or less I am...I resist anything better than my own diversity,Breathe the air but leave plenty after me,And am not stuck up, and am in my place.

There is an absolute sense of both humility and celebration to what Davidson does, even in the most grim settings. And its is clear that, in his company, there it would be an immediate impulse to say “take my picture,” given his openness to everything human that is the kindest invitation to intimacy. You would not hide from him, and you would not be afraid of the result, even though it would tell the truth.

Beauty is an uneasy thing. It can entrance and frighten in equal measure, and Julia Randall’s drawings are replete with both effects. The puzzle here is that their nominal subjects should render them harmless. Like the 18th century Chardin painting of a bubble blower, these inflated pieces of gum, with all their charm of virtuoso technique, might be expected to provoke only the quiet laughter of recognition.

But there is no escaping the unnerving paradox of these works. Although they have none of the literally grotesque that attaches to Gericault’s studies from the morgue, or Soutine’s dead stingray, there is still a hint of dissection about them, with their textures resembling the sheath of the heart, a placental sac or a womb. Several of these forms are shown pinned, as if for display in a museum of bizarre anatomical specimens, while others are stretched and partially severed by bright metal dental probes.

But these unsettling associations are accompanied by the splendor of what is really a catalogue of breathing, with each exhalation a memorial object that is not limited to the last one taken. Rather, the drawings collectively register the wonder of every breath from the first on, as if respiration had an illustrated calendar.

This same insight becomes animated in the artist’s video entitled “Sticky” included in the exhibit. Here, bubbles emerge out of the dark, expanding and contracting like tiny antique respirators or eyeless, ephemeral puppets whose operators’ hands desperately clutch at words.

That same desperation haunts the literal mouths taken from the drawing series “Lures.” Here, the breath’s avenue is also the word’s exit, in a mute, comic gasping for something to say. Within these tongue-filled interiors, the voice is not audible, but tactile.

In several of these drawings, mouth bubbles glisten with transcendent spit curving across the surface like one of Vermeer’s convex mirrors, and in all the small nooks of skin, penciled details reveal lace and pearls of saliva. All of them are remarkable, but one that especially stands out is “Dandelion,” where the bubble is a globe inside which all creation sits, and we, in the words of a medieval German mystic, are like “a feather on the breath of God.”

Don Voisine: New Work

[published March 2014, Art New England]

Fred Giampietro Gallery, New Haven, CT

Don Voisine, Pass , 2010-11. 18" x 27" Oil On Wood Panel

Edges are both something and nothing, defining space without sharing in it. This paradox is a constant in Don Voisine’s painting. He works his images into a variety of dimensions, but it is in the nature of each of them to render scale irrelevant. As a group, they read as constantly shifting variations that could exchange measurements with each other at any moment. Given that instability, it would be better to ignore the instructions given by many of the titles, and simply walk through this exhibition inventing new ones for them.

The fantasies of geometry which are the subject of Stand In with its mock shadows and its shifting perspectives of inside and out suggest a Josef Albers unnerved and desperate. Whatever order is available in this particular world is an illusion, though an enthralling one. Perhaps these forms are simply the doors of perception, opened and closed by our looking.

Interlock, a painting of 2013, uses its tectonic plate formations as a device for allying Ad Reinhardt’s degrees of darkness with the formal splendor found in any one of

Robert Motherwell’s Elegies to the Spanish Republic. And here the edge turns literal, with the triangle notches into the black shapes suggesting a double-edged razor blade that has been sterilized by fire.

There is a subtly rendered potential for disaster in the piece Untitled (2012), as if a road plan guaranteed to produce collisions at its intersections had been laid over a slightly canted city map, and now quietly awaited the the crash of rush hour.

In the 2013 work Concord, a square of deeper darkness floats above a paler ground like some memorial to a future war awaiting its inscription, or a black hole in miniature that, within its compacted dimensions, creates a prison for all nearby light.

Pass is a work in which Voisine has managed the reduction of a landscape to an abstract purity that is still entirely convincing as an exercise in realism. Its grounding in the world as it is reads as both complete and astute. This is one of those pictures which make clear that a painting is the only trustworthy way of seeing anything worthwhile at all.

Memories are often caricatures, with all the exaggerations, omissions, and inventions of the past as we wish it had been. The novelist Isabel Allende has gone so far as to simply equate memory to a self-interested fiction, carefully selected from the best and worst of what has become of any given lifetime. These are useful frames of reference for the collection of large scale works and sketches by Red Grooms now on exhibition at Yale.

Cedar Bar was a recognizable memorial from the start. In 1986, the year that Grooms penciled and crayoned the work into existence, nearly half of those pictured – including Jackson Pollock, Franz Kline and Mark Rothko – were dead. Today, only the writer Dore Ashton, and Red Grooms himself – who appears twice as the bi-locating barkeep – survive.

The subject interested Grooms enough that in the same year he created a three dimensional model of the scene from a different perspective – now at the Princeton University Art Museum – for a full scale installation which was never constructed. A year later, he made a lithograph based on the model. Each version presented an incremental obituary for a lost world, portrayed in a frieze of cartoons. That includes the bar itself which, in the form all of these habitués knew it, had been demolished more than twenty years before the mural size drawing was made.

The detailed remembrance of this place suggests that a verifiable reality lies beneath the commedia dell'arte riot of figures which it cannot entirely contain. Each of the four pyramids of bottles against the far wall rearrange the same identifiable brands of liquor, and every glass in the place is a set piece of illusion. The framed prints in the background of paintings by Thomas Gainsborough, George Stubbs and John James Audubon are the final irony of realism in pictorial counterpoint to the abstract tradition revealed only in the splatters of color on Pollock’s shoes and de Kooning’s pants. A brief note of continuity is provided in the congruence between Audubon’s rendering of two hawks picking at a duck’s corpse and the brawling pair on the barroom floor, the history of art as one long record of fury.

Did any of this actually happen in what was this real location? Whatever Grooms wants this particular past to be is all of his devising. If we have no memory of our own to correct what he provides, then his are at least as good as any. The only alternative I could offer from my own experience was having known Harold Rosenberg, the slightly off center pillar of the piece in fedora and green overcoat. He reads as a giant, and while the bulk of him is exaggerated, it is true to the weight of his mind and the assertiveness of his presence in the rooms where I last saw him. I am willing , then, to trade my memory for Grooms’, or, more accurately, embellish mine with his. And in those other cases of people whom I never met, as for example, Ruth Sligman, the woman applying lipstick who was Jackson Pollock’s lover and survived the car crash that killed him – her rendering by Grooms posed like a Reginald Marsh sexpot, will now be my choice of record over against any period photograph. And I am endlessly grateful for the tiny ghosts of cigarette smoke, drifting like comic strip balloons left blank for anyone to fill with what should have been said in that loud dive.

Studio at the Rue des Grands-Augustins, painted by Grooms from 1990–96 is a very different fantasy of memory. At the center of it is Picasso’s Guernica of 1937, which has been decked out as if it were a commentary on the spill of cubism within a parallel universe. For Grooms, the comic grotesque is the way both to the horror confronted by the thing made and the domestic routines of its making. With all the unexpected alterations and shifting within the iconic painting, the confusion over what is and isn’t an accurate rendering (was there a mechanical horse in the original?) turns the imperfect recall of the piece into a subject. The emphatic glory of black and white and gray emerges within an ordinary world of color and tea kettles and pets, and Grooms’ despair of evoking the masterwork is countered by celebrating the absurdity of his attempt.

One other opera buffa is essayed in Picasso Goes to Heaven, (1973) where the painter who is its subject, Falstaffian in his checkered underwear, can-cans in brazen and furious delight beneath an unfinished paradise of artists which arches above him like a carnival of temptations to his demented saint. As he does in all his work, Grooms makes pictures of noise like no one else, and that raucous constant is the measure of what he must call a life worth remembering.​

Rates of Exchange: the Museum as Gift

[published November, 2013, Art New England]

Rembrandt Harmensz van Rijn, Self Portrait in a Cap and Scarf with the Face Dark: Bust, 1633. Etching printed in black on laid paper. Gift of Mrs. James E. Scripps.​Courtesy of the Detroit Institute of Arts

​An urban society needs two institutions to deal with non-functional objects: the sanitation department and the museum.

– S. Dillon Ripley

Detroit is currently renowned for its vanishing. Only its debts have any substance. And its museum.

It cannot be entirely a surprise, then, that the holdings of the Detroit Institute of Arts (DIA) are being considered as salable assets, the returns from which could be used to pay off the billions of dollars owed by the local government to an imposing list of creditors. Since the collection belongs to the city, it is a uniquely public institution, unlike many other major museums which function as independent corporations. The irony is that public ownership makes it vulnerable as the consequence of a municipal economic disaster.

This could simply be read as a form of hostage taking, meant to produce a heightened sense of the crisis without any real intent to carry out a summary execution. But the mere possibility of such an outcome has provoked considerable comment, both academic and outraged.

Jeffrey Hamburger, a professor of art history at Harvard, has initiated a petition addressed to Kevyn Duane Orr, Emergency Manager of Detroit, the official who has taken been given responsibility for resolving the city’s economic quandary. With impassioned hyperbole the document declares that the marketing of any of the museum’s collections “would seal the city’s shame” as “an act of draconian cultural iconoclasm without parallel in modern times.“ Having gathered some five thousand signatures in less than a month, it belongs to that category of necessary, if futile, gestures that are among the last visible traces of a social conscience in this country.

That characteristic did not so clearly emerge in a recent exchange of letters in the New York Times which framed the issue around the question “How many lives is a Rembrandt worth?” The discussion veered into self-righteous moral rectitude with its concern over destitute retirees denied their pensions, as if that was the only social disaster that might deserve noting.

Hypocrisy is always a near neighbor to such exchanges, especially when none of the correspondents raise what might be thought to be the more crucial forms of the question.

One of these would be: What are lives without Rembrandt worth? The closest that any of the participants come to this issue is an artist who became one because of having seen Rodin’s The Thinker perched outside the doors of the DIA. But this is both sentimental and private. A moral argument about the way the quality of all living is different because museums exist, even for those who never enter them, would need to posit a more defiant and inclusive alternative to the deeply pessimistic view that the only common human experience is economic suffering.

After all, the desperate social needs of Detroit are not unique to it. There is a logic which would suggest that all the art in all the museums of the world might be sold to bring comfort to the poor. This is a traditional charge against the Roman Catholic Church with its fully stocked Vatican Museums. Of course, the fact that the Sistine Chapel has a theoretical value does not mean that anyone is in a position to buy it, although in these days of hedge fund capital perhaps that is no longer the rhetorical impossibility it once was.

But this brings the discussion around to another question that was also missing from the Times exchange. One of the writers who contributes to it does consider the madness of auctioning off the Parthenon as a moral gesture, but her sole alternative proposal to selling the treasures of Detroit is to suggest that a commission be established to determine the counter value of keeping the collection in purely economic terms, balance sheet compared to balance sheet.

But why accept the assumption that a Rembrandt is worth anything at all, at least in terms that reduce it simply to its value in monetary exchange? Frank Robinson, a former director of museums at Williams College and the Rhode Island School of Design, points out that art values have inflated to the point that a million dollars is a common price for a single object. And museums have helped to establish the precedents for these mutilated values, as they collected objects whose original worth was never thought of as transferrable. Now wrenched from their context and purpose, the artworks become investments. There is an alchemy of museums which turns everything merely to gold, leaving the institutions as authenticators of economic value. In the process, museums have become collaborators in their own destruction, since even the wealthiest of them usually find it impossible to acquire works independently in the current market.

In the freeport storage vaults of Switzerland, paintings and sculpture have ceased to become art in any recognizable sense. They vanish from view, existing only as commodities of status and possession. This expanding category of art valuation reinforces the expectations of class privilege, and provides the comforting explanation of elitism, thereby freeing the larger community from taking responsibility for either its art or its artists.

If this state of things cannot be corrected by simply declaring works of art valueless in monetary terms, why not begin by establishing a system of price controls, with a cap at a level of affordability and a limit to the number of annual purchases any single institution is permitted to make. Once an object enters a museum collection, it would legally cease to have any economic value. Nothing can leave save through exchange or gift, but the values of such exchanges would be achieving comprehensiveness and depth in a collection, not a competition for singular masterpieces.

To accompany this there would be a move away from the model of major depositories towards a more decentralized and broad redistribution of art. A precedent here would be the “Fifty Works for Fifty States” donations from the collection of Dorothy and Herbert Vogel whose own model of patronage was personal, engaged, and free of any mercenary interest whatsoever. Similarly, there was the Andy Warhol Foundation transfer of Warhol photographs to a number of college and university museums throughout the country, though the Foundation has not entirely abandoned the market for other transactions. This proposal might have international applications where claims for the repatriation of illegally acquired art objects could be resolved on the basis, not simply of legal right but of cultural obligation to recognize art as an inheritance without national boundaries. This would mean not only the return of looted objects but the gift of legitimately acquired ones.

It is this notion of art freely transferred that confronts what is truly unsettling about the threat faced by the Detroit Institute of Arts, and that is the idea that the works which might be sold off came to the museum largely as donations. This potential betrayal of gifts strikes particularly deep. Whatever may have motivated these transfers of ownership(and surely some reasons were either nefarious or self-serving) they constituted a public gesture outside the usual boundaries of profit and loss. Permanent as they may seem, museums are always acts of desperation; offerings of fragile gifts. And if a Rembrandt makes life worth living, then each of us should have one, and a museum to give it to us.

Reading the Ruins

[posted 19 August 2013, Art New England blog]

Holy Land: Photographs by Joy BushMattatuck Museum, Waterbury, CT

Joy Bush, Holy, 1997. Image courtesy of the artist.

A Holy Land laid waste seems closer to the truth somehow, if one thinks only of our present in which the square outside the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem has been filled with tear gas, and a thirty foot wall marks the western border of Jerusalem. But the inaccurate model of that landscape spread across nearly twenty acres of a hillside in Waterbury, CT, was not meant by John Greco, a Waterbury attorney who began its construction in 1955, to be a lesson in current events. Neither did he imagine it becoming a long, continuing history of decay after its closing thirty years ago.

Since 1987, in a series of black and white images which strips this curious place to its essentials, Joy Bush has been compiling a a meditation on the ruins of belief. To the particular melancholy of an abandoned amusement park, she has brought the grieving clarity of a war photographer. Her work identifies these manufactured relics as examples of a sentimental history like those 18th century English garden monuments built to look as if they had crumbled in place. But here, this claiming of a past that does not belong, later to assume more spectacular scale with the Las Vegas Sphinx, is given a specifically American mix of kitsch and desperation. Imagine it as “a city upon a hill” – that self confident Puritan vision of grandeur rendered in traditional Roman Catholic iconography, then revealed as a sham.

What Bush identifies so well is the way in which the surviving wreckage of the place makes sense; she captures an unconscious intention that all this might well have been meant for a ruin, its power magnified by its slow vanishing. The giant overgrown and graffitied metal letters that identify the site are evocative of the Hollywood sign which was originally followed by the word “Land.” This places it in the tradition of cinematic pageants like those of Cecil B. DeMille who was directing his film The Ten Commandments at the same time that Holy Land USA was being built. Even if on a somewhat smaller scale, the details of this Waterbury landmark were nearly as ornate and exaggerated, and as fragile, as those sound stage sets. The crudeness of their construction is still somehow convincing, where the cell in the photograph entitled “Summer” brings the imagination immediately to the sounds of torture. In “Abandoned” the sheet metal and wood appear as if they had been crushed by some weight, the past crumpling the landscape like a deformed memory. Then there is a procession of decapitated concrete magi, leaving open the question of the difference between vandalism and collecting. “Temple” has an eerie resemblance to the skeleton dome left after the Hiroshima bombing, and, in “Tower,” one of the most telling images Bush composes, a single piece of toy architecture balances on a rock slope in front of a giant cross under clouds that appear to be more permanent than the landscape beneath them.

There has been a recent campaign to purchase the property that the remains of Greco’s project still stand on, but to what end? How would one reinvent, much less restore, such a place? THese photographs make a different argument. One of them shows metropolitan Waterbury, all its industrial fabric now wiped away, from the vantage point of Holy Land, one ruined city overlooking another. This is the way it should be left, like a prophecy of the disaster that has found us.​

In the Governor’s Garden

[published July, 2013, CT News Junkie]

Carol Krieger Davidson, Days of Danger. Mixed media, aluminum.

There are no sculptures in Eden, unless you count the burning sword spinning in an angel’s hand to keep visitors out. But more recent gardens have made a place for them, and so there are precedents for the gathering of work by Connecticut artists now scattered on the grounds of the governor’s residence in Hartford.

What to make of this? Since Governor Malloy approved the twenty sculptures chosen by the curator, Joan Hurwit, we can read his own pleasures here, and they are largely unexceptional. It may be that his sense of democracy inevitably yields a harmless standard, with a number of the pieces striving towards that notion of transcendent lawn ornament that would place them a degree or two above the ubiquitous gnomes of suburban landscapes. With the exception of Carol Krieger Davidson’s Days of Danger, there is nothing with any overt political content and even that aluminum mob reads as an assemblage of mechanical circus warriors, more comic than ominous.

At the same time, there are also moments of marvel and invention: a wonderfully lighthearted vista with Peter Kirkiles’ rulers measuring an alley of tree trunks; the work of David Hayes, who died shortly after his two pieces were installed, one of them a fuming pillar of smoke turned to metal; Mark Mennin’s granite Amorpheus, a punning title for a sleepless night’s pillow; and Deuces Wild, by Jonathan Waters, its walls folding and unfolding like a massive underground machine making a break for it.

Clearly a work in progress, the year long installation still must contend with obvious open spaces that are empty of work, while other pieces are crowded into areas where one would expect more independence. But these curatorial questions are much less important than the issues of funding and accessibility raised by the governor’s patronage.

It must be said that the principle of state government offering a venue for larger scale work by artists living in Connecticut is admirable. It is even obligatory. But how that is done and the rhetoric that is attached to the doing, are in this case painfully flawed. The public relations material for this project is almost hysterical in its assurance that no tax moneys were used to underwrite it. Instead, it is the “generosity” of the artists in making their work available that is praised.

But why is it that only artists are expected to be generous in such a fashion? Would we imagine plumbers being so inclined? Or stockbrokers? So avid are the governor’s spokespeople to declare that public funds had no part in this, that they further the infuriating stereotype of art as an unreasonable extravagance in these days of straitened budgets. In the hope of of avoiding condemnation for creating a minor Versailles, they mimic the mindset which thinks of art in only such elitist terms.

While occasional tours will grant some few the opportunity to view the works sequestered here, the needs for security guarantee they will be generally inaccessible. If the governor wanted to encourage the celebration of area artists, why not install their sculptures on the Capitol grounds? There are more dangers there, but that is in the nature of public art as it pushes out into the world. As it is now, what has been created here is a privileged garden, where the fence is the only definitive sculpture. This may be an Eden with art, but the gates are still slammed shut.

Portrait of an Executioner: On Painting Stories

[published May, 2013, Artes]

Burst of Light: Caravaggio and His Legacy Wadsworth Atheneum

Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio, Salome Receives the Head of Saint John the Baptist, c. 1606–10. Oil on canvas. The National Gallery, London​

He has a murderer’s face, which is to say that he looks like any one of us. A workman, obedient without pleasure, his hand in a paralyzed clutch of the hair on the decapitated head

There are other portraits in this painting on loan from the National Gallery, London, of the aftermath of John the Baptist’s killing. One of them is a Salome not willing to test her bored composure with a direct look at what’s bleeding on the plate. Or is it her at all? Instead, could she and the other woman in the background be from among the palace’s foundation of servants, arranging the details of the imminent presentation to the king’s table? And then there is the rictus face of John, where Caravaggio finds the vanishing of the self that is death’s clearest presence. It is impossible not to imagine Gericault recalling this portrayal in those later, fearful documents that are his studies of guillotined prisoners.

But it is the executioner who is the center around which this picture turns. The bleak humanity of his expression is not a caricature of violence. He might be one of Beckett’s woeful tramps, wondering if there is any way that he can be saved. The same uncertainty and dismay mark the face of the apostle in the Denial of Peter, as the the sparks of an unseen fire spit towards him like a hint of damnation. There is a self-awareness to his betrayal even as he pronounces himself ignorant and a stranger. A soldier, his profile perfect even in darkness, is audience to the two competing testimonies of Peter and the insistent woman, adjudicating in silence, but never heard to pronounce his decision.

What makes a wilderness? In the largest scale of the Caravaggio paintings among the five in this show, the one from the Nelson Atkins Museum in Kansas City shows the young John the Baptist, eyes darkened by some fantasy of his dying, like an unthroned king, or the exiled duke of Shakespeare’s As You Like It, considering the possibility that he has not been punished, but rewarded. Oak leaves form the cloudy pageant of the background, while at John’s feet, two fleshy mullein plants wait like temptations to escape from his future. In Martha and Mary Magdalen the Baptist’s’ wilderness has become a single flower in the Magdalen’s hand, while in Saint Francis of Assisi in Ecstasy, the Caravaggio owned by the Wadsworth, the botanical catalogue of the foreground presents the saint as a genius loci of the natural world at the same moment that he is receiving the marks of Christ’s passion.

But in the background of the Francis painting, with its darkness broken only by a fragment of distant bonfire and the lines of what might be either dawn or sunset in the unstable time frame of religious ecstasy, there is a story hidden. In the near distance is a cowled figure who might be a monk companion to the saint or some tempter in religious disguise, while further away, a group of figures are pointing to some other history outside the frame as if completely unaware of the divine making itself visible in the foreground.

What narrative painting since Caravaggio can escape him as a point of reference? In Picasso’s Guernica the inheritance is as clear as any, given the way that the painter has found to depict a terror which transforms the ordinary world into a stage for agony, and which creates a distance for our visual resolution of the image that keeps us from being distracted by technique. Caravaggio’s insight is not a matter of chiaroscuro, but of storytelling. This is why the gaggle of followers assembled here – with the significant exceptions of Francisco de Zurbarán and Georges de la Tour – read as unintentionally comic parodies. They simply do not struggle to believe, as Caravaggio does. He is the damaged, faithful servant desperate to find the sacred in the midst of an unruly, fierce world. But his only discovery in the end is the detail of the broken comb on the table in front of Mary Magdalene. Here the closest that the painter can get to the truth of it all is to be found in a perfectly rendered imperfection. What other story does this world tell?​

Think of a greenhouse as a machine for shaping light. This is one way in which Marjorie Gillette Wolfe has rendered these workplaces in the series of photographs which she has been making since 1996. The earliest of these, as for example, Kurtz Farms #9 and Summer Hill #10, present a vocabulary of recognizable forms for the ongoing subject. The hooped arches with translucent walls sealed against a lowering sky read like prison huts for shadows. The sharp lines of their frameworks, whose arcs are inscribed with the precision of a draftsman’s compass, will be traced again and again as the photographs accumulate.

This entire body of work could function as a lesson book in the investigation of hidden abstractions, with the photograph Blue Brown, Clinton 308 offering a concise visual catalogue of the geometries of tension that these structures contain. It also provides case studies in color saturation, where Wolfe has the most subtle tonalities register with a magical clarity, especially at the thin line which separates the first trace of color from black and white.

But the depository of allusions in her work contains far more than merely formal exercises. Boulder might be an Edward Weston nude, in Blue 1, there is an Arthur Dove landscape, and Rose displays a detail of Tintoretto drapery. Other references are architectural, with catacombs and yurts and Romanesque vaults in Clinton 14, 15 and 60. And then there are the suggestions of various mediums with the dampened and folded paper of Phase 1, the water beading on surfaces in Clinton 408, the sculptured, tactile presence of Blue 8, the irrational calligraphy West Tisbury , the collaged, torn arrangements of Blue 3 and Triangular, and the lithographic Snow Greenhouse 3.

Most striking in this thorough documentation of an artificial environment, is the boundary work which Wolfe does with these membranes of vinyl and their fragile hold on the space between inside and out. These are the heat treasuries, made to counter weather and calendar in the service of floral commerce. But plastic can go to ruin, too, and its punctured surfaces through which the sky is visible might well offer a means of escape for plant convicts desperate for the risk of the world as it actually is.

This is the midway fairground beanbag game swallowing face freak show with curiosity shop, and a Ferris wheel spin behind a Hitchcock strangler, all accompanied by carousel organ, manic laughter, and carnival barker rants of lost innocence. In these scrapbook assemblages, Larry Lewis finds his own version of Citizen Kane’s storage cellar, with monuments and knickknacks jumbled together in a wildly democratic sprawl. Quintessentially American, these reassemblies of our public world with its cinema liars and serial fictions of advertising have an aura of private dismay about them

One of those nearly lost artists whose work has been preserved by a surprised, but sympathetic heir, Lewis left no glossary behind. Thus, having said nothing, he appears to license speculation. And this there has been. But the cataloging of visual influences, which might include Henry Darger’s suspicious children, René Magritte’s cheerful disorientation, and E.J Bellocq’s forthright prostitutes, is far less interesting than discovering the source of imminent disaster in these collaged volumes. Their voracious looting of images yields graphic inventions which read as existential sample books, or an atheist’s version of the Book of Kells.

Perhaps he meant nothing more by them than what was practically required of their making. There have been private exercises before that were meant only to preserve the artist’s sanity. The real mystery of Lewis’s work is how in all this color, there is so much darkness.​

Is there any sculptor so resistant to domestication as Anthony Caro? The reality of this is, perhaps unintentionally, made clear in a concise retrospective of the artist’s work currently at the Yale Center for British Art.

The installation reads like a roadside menagerie with an assemblage of too small cages in which animals pace frantically back and forth on the way to madness. Or, more benignly, as a latter day natural history cabinet with its species specific groupings of objects presented as coffee table artifacts. The radical edge balancing of these works, resentful of their pedestals, reads here as an advertisement for executives’ office toys. They are gizmos deployed with a preference for their illusory charm, not their brazen dismantling of space. And Caro’s Table Piece Z-69, reminiscent of nothing so much as Alberto Giacometti’s 1932 cast bronze Woman with Her Throat Cut, is elevated on a platform so high that all sense of looking down at a crime scene is erased from it.

Some pieces escape the muting of their setting. Several of Caro’s early works in bronze show the influence of Henry Moore – whose studio assistant he was for a time – but with a wonderfully bulgy sense of humor that Moore never evokes. Among a group of bronze miniatures which could be toy theaters for Spartan children, the very recent Sackbut (2011-2012) stands out as a compact brutality of folded metal.

The works of paper register as not very expensive tricks, fashioned for the artist’s own curiosity. They are not entirely self-indulgent, but they possess nothing like the inventiveness of late Matisse cut-outs, except perhaps for Paper Sculpture No. 98, possessed as it is of what might be the lines of an electrocardiogram autobiography. In the same way, the clay- metal assemblages give an almost almost flippant, “how easy it is, then” impression, though a piece solely of stoneware entitled Minoan lives up to its name in evoking an excavated past.

But the power Caro has over steel is clear enough in the recognizable fragments of metal ladle and clamps in Catalan Scrawl, a collage of infernal qualities like a machine from Kafka’s penal colony, and the broken slab like a grave marker extending deep below ground of Table Piece CLXVIII.

But the most assertive presence of the sculptor is apparent in a view, through a gallery museum window, of Caro’s monumental Ocean, where, in a planned coincidence, the Yale University Art Gallery has sited it. There it sits, stentorian on the street; an unconfined imperial monster.​

Fictional Horrors: A Reflection on Art, Torture, and Hypocrisy[published November, 2012, Big, Red and Shiny] Torture is still in the air. Only two months ago, United States Attorney General Eric Holder confirmed that no further action would be taken to prosecute anyone for the deaths of two men held by the CIA, one in Iraq in 2003, and the other in Afghanistan in 2002. These were the last of one hundred cases of alleged mistreatment that were investigated, but not one of which resulted in either indictment or trial. A few days after that announcement, Human Rights Watch published a report documenting previously unacknowledged uses of waterboarding on Libyans detained by the CIA. They were later transferred into the custody of the Gadhafi government, where they were subjected to further torture.Murmurs regarding legality and impunity still complicate the efforts being made by our society to come to terms not only with its crimes, but also with its indifference. We might have been better prepared four years ago, had we better understood then the lessons of an apparently unrelated incident of public dismay over a work of art.

In April of 2008, Aliza Shvarts, in fulfillment of the requirements for an arts major at Yale University, announced the submission of a senior project that would include videos of what she described as a series of self-induced miscarriages, along with a display of blood that resulted from them. “They say, blood will have blood.” and it will. Although when Shakespeare claimed so in Macbeth, he could hardly have had in mind this proposed art installation by an undergraduate or the vituperative responses to it.

This could not help but evoke Linda Nochlin’s 1971 declaration that woman artists needed to confront those who were responsible for dismissing them: “The fault lies not in our stars, our hormones, our menstrual cycles, or our empty internal spaces, but in our institutions, and our education.” It also recalled the bloodletting in the staged works – from that same decade – carried out by Gina Pane who asserted that “Our entire culture is based on the representation of the body. Performance does not so much annul painting as help out the birth of a new painting based on different explanations and functions of the body in art.” Given these earlier insights, it could have been argued that Shvarts was simply being clear that her body was not to be reduced to a mere reproductive mechanism.

Instead, there was an almost obligatory frenzy to the catalogue of outrage which emerged when the first details of the work were made public in a Yale Daily News report. The President of the National Right to Life Committee described it as the “clearly depraved” act of “a serial killer.” A spokesman for NARAL Pro-Choice America called it “offensive and insensitive to the women who have suffered the heartbreak of miscarriage.”

And the authorities at Yale were a match for the outside critics, although their vocabulary was somewhat less inflammatory, beginning with the Dean of Yale College, who was “appalled,” he said, at this work of “performance art” that “bears no relation to what I consider appropriate for an undergraduate senior project.” “If I had known about this,” asserted the Dean of the Yale School of Art in exculpatory precision, “I would not have permitted it to go forward.”

In response, Shvarts disingenuously explained that “it’s not the intention of the piece to scandalize anyone,” at the same time as she produced an oxymoron by predicting that “some people will be upset with the message and will not agree with it.”

Assuming she intended to create a message, then the question immediately arises as to what it was. What did it say about a woman’s control over her body or the right to abortion? Shvarts used the term “induced miscarriage” to describe the process, which is an euphemism indeed. If naming is indeed an “ideological act,” as she herself claimed, than this omission of vocabulary was revealing in its timidity.

Was it real or fakery? For Shvarts, what was most “poignant” and politically meaningful element in her work was “the impossibility of accurately identifying the resulting blood” – a point she claimed all other commentary had overlooked.

This was not “ambivalence” – the word Shvarts used – as in an uncertainty about how to respond, but rather, “ambiguity” – a lack of clarity about what was being responded to. Even those few who were publicly supportive of the work found confusion unavoidable, as in the case of the writer Warren Ellis who was impressed by Shvarts “if she’s doing what I think she’s doing.” The hoax was to be celebrated. But what if there was no deception?

It was this very lack of clarity that gave her critics license to read the work in ways that assumed their worst possible cases. One Yale administrator authoritatively declared – after a meeting with Shvarts meant to counter the growing hysteria of the media – that “the entire project is an art piece, a creative fiction designed to draw attention to the ambiguity surrounding form and function of a woman’s body.” When Shvarts immediately went public with a statement denying this conclusion, the same administrator declared that “her denial is part of her performance,” and, on a melancholy note, confessed to being “disappointed that she would deliberately lie to the press in the name of art.”

This exchange in itself had a theatre of the absurd quality that almost stood alone as an artistic achievement. But if I were to guess, it would be to say that Shvarts had done nothing to anticipate the form or the extent of what her undertaking would provoke. As a result she had only spontaneous jargon to offer in her defense. When that unsurprisingly compounded the outcry, she lapsed into silence. Though I did invite her to comment by e-mail, I did not anticipate a reply and none was forthcoming. But there was really no mystery to be solved about the nature of the work. “The piece exists only in its telling” was one of her statements that was clear enough. It left one to wonder if the art was ever meant to exist physically at all. But it is the history of the response to the work, and not only the work itself or the artist’s motives that raises the most crucial questions about the social function of art in contemporary American society. If Shvarts, as she claimed, created “a project that lives up to the standard of what art is supposed to be,” then where was that standard to be found? For her to claim that “the performance exists only as I chose to represent it,” is an artist’s mediocre fantasy that would apply only to work that is politically unimportant.

Given that Shvarts confessed to a strong belief that “art should be a medium for politics and ideologies, not just a commodity,” there could be a case made for the use of ambiguity as a consciousness raising instrument. Here was an unequivocal statement of what she saw as her responsibility. It was not a matter of some conditional freedom, which an artist may exercise only – according to a member of the Yale faculty – if that artist takes “full intellectual accountability for the strong response he or she may provoke.” But accountability in this case does not lie all on one side. The audience of commentators also bear responsibility for willfully – through malevolence or self-interest – distorting an artist’s work.

And so a professor of art at Williams College, writing in the Wall Street Journal, declares that Shvarts is “inadvertently” raising the question of “how exactly is Yale teaching its undergraduates to make art?” A columnist in Newsweek predicts that the incident will be used “ as proof that all an aspiring artist need do for celebrity is create a piece offensive enough to be banned by an institution,” thereby concluding that – for all her political claims, Shvarts’ real concern was the market. For the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni, the central problem that results from this controversy has only to do with Yale’s addressing “the institutional framework that approved and supported this project.”

This last at least raises the possibility of failures – not only by the University – but in the artist’s relationship to it. Outside of some hollow statements of concern for her physical and mental health, Yale never acted other than in defense of its own institutional reputation. Shvarts did declare that all she wanted was “to get back to a point where they [representatives of the University] renew their support, because ultimately this was something they supported.” What evidence there was for this was never offered, but her abandonment by the institution appears to have mattered to her. Whether this was naive or manipulative, it is uninteresting from the point of view of the art itself. If the piece was meant as a political challenge, it is difficult to see how Yale’s self-righteous posturing could have been a surprise.

The MFA program at that university has acquired an almost transcendent status as a guarantee of artistic currency in the brutal merchandising that the culture now requires. But it has never been known as a place in which social activism was considered any more than an aberrant phase that an artist might pass through on the way to the abstractions that matter.

In the end she had no subject. The media exposure exhausted the power of the work over issues that were unimportant. The horror was displaced by the acceptable, fictional distresses of her audience, while the actual terrors which demand confrontation in our country-- but which its citizenry, including its artists, are largely evading-- abide. Did Shvarts hope for a revolution in the institutional vision of the University as a result of her work? If so, the object of her hope is where the political problem lies. She was clearly unprepared to confront the cultural hypocrisy of the response to her work. If she had been more astute, several events contemporary to her censure would have provided material for a useful retort.

Also in early April of 2008, public announcements were made of unambiguous horrors which failed to produce responses that could even begin to compare, in either number or intensity, with the imaginary constructs fashioned by those who condemned Shvarts’ work. An ABC News report detailed meetings of White House officials where the minutiae of “enhanced interrogation techniques” were outlined and scheduled for specific persons in CIA custody, including “whether they would be slapped, pushed, deprived of sleep or subjected to simulated drowning, called waterboarding.” One of the participants was thoughtful enough to comment that “History will not judge this kindly."

But the crucial question is the judgment of the present. With a Yale alumnus who was President at the time overseeing the institutionalization of torture with the use of Justice Department memoranda which one Washington Post columnist described as formalizing the belief that “that anything the president or his designates do -- no matter how illegal, barbaric or un-American -- is justifiable in the name of national self-defense,” the university – and the press – have developed a tolerance that was not made available to the fictions of Aliza Shvarts. And their silence is shared by a member of the Senate who yet found time to decry video games which are "becoming more and more vivid, violent, and offensive to our most basic values ...and beyond all decency." Think here of the mother in The Catcher in the Rye who tears up at a movie scene, then smacks her child who is desperate to use the toilet.

There are artists who have confronted the consequences of the above-noted legal fiction, which has been described as "... in effect, the blueprint that led to Abu Ghraib.” But works such as Fernando Botero’s paintings of the men brutalized in that prison and the exquisite ironic marbles of hooded men carved by the Iraqi artist Abdel-Karim Khalil are considered eccentric anomalies, if they are considered at all

The artist Pia Lindman, who as a lecturer at Yale served as Aliza Shvarts’ adviser, made no public statement on the matter of the suppressed project, although there was a report that “appropriate action” had been taken by Yale against members of the faculty who had approved what Shvarts had undertaken. But in earlier comments made regarding the effects of 9/11 upon American culture, Lindman proclaimed herself “still waiting for this self-aggrandizing mass psychosis – the uncritical belief in the omnipotence and goodness of the American people, troops and government – to dissolve and have it replaced with sober self-reflection.” Sobriety was clearly not a function of the discussion around Shvarts’ work

But sobriety may no longer be useful as a strategy for moral criticism. We are long past the time when the simple thought of Medea’s children slaughtered behind closed doors is a sufficient call to dismay over the human capacity for self-destructive evil. And – as in the arts – the power of the imagination has lost its hold over the employees of power who once relied on merely showing the instruments of torture to produce their desired results. Aliza Shvarts could have found a subject that made us see clearly what frightens us most – our own faces in those of the torturers. That could yet happen, through new work of hers or someone else's, and art would be made of a horror that belongs to us alone. But what Shvarts did accomplish, however unintentionally, is almost equally important. The controversy over her work exposed a central irony in American culture: that a tragedy of manners in which the disguise of tastefulness is threatened is far more unnerving to us than the moral tragedies of state-licensed torture and murder. The lie that our personal security is dependent upon the commission of such crimes provides a useful evasion for our consciences. We pretend to be shocked only by what does not matter. This was once known as the road to perdition.

An image of Ronald Reagan sawing vigorously through his own skull might not immediately come to mind as the perfect gift. But generosity has many forms, and the outrageous is one of them. As he squeezes the world, the pompadoured president is death’s dancer, inheritor of e.e. cummings' “blueyed boy” Buffalo Bill, one of those dapper, handsome murderers.

There are more images like this. Toilets abound, spewing boyfriends and vomit, evoking Yeats’s mansion of love in “the place of excrement.” There is no brighter picture than Amboosh of the Vietnam War’s slaughterous comedy, with its Coca-Cola and crucifixion. And then there are the suburbs in the print Modern Home, with their own saw and cigarettes; the dollhouse dream of coffee on the patio and the burgeoning destruction beneath the delightful fantasy of property.

These are among the twenty Peter Saul lithographs and etchings made from 1967 through 2003 and chosen by the artist as a gift to Yale in 2007. “What gives?” has a special echo as a question here. In response, Saul gives an initially equivocal response: “I feel kindly towards Yale, I don’t know exactly why.” There is no obvious explanation of alumni loyalty. “I didn’t want to go to Yale as an art student...it never occurred to me to be well educated...I didn’t see art that way.”

He does offer the suggestion that the “pleasant experience” of the journey from his Upper Hudson Valley home after having been invited to visit Yale, his encounters with students, and what registers for him as the university’s unqualified hospitality, including “a TV set, you know,“ were all “small thrills” that impressed him.

A larger thrill is that, “They bought my painting...which is very important.” This is Hitler’s Bunker, an exquisitely rendered large canvas of 2006 which Yale acquired shortly afterward it was made as clearly “the right one for us” according to Jennifer Gross, the Seymour H. Knox, Jr., Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art. “I was amazed by that,” Saul remembers, since it is obviously “not easy to sell a painting featuring Hitler.” But it is not only the presence of the Nazi leader, at the very moment of his suicide,which is challenging about the picture. It is also its reminder of forgotten alliances, with Stalin and Eisenhower paired in the righteous violence out of which the “good war” myth is fashioned.

Gross especially celebrates Saul’s “radical, tough decision to make work this way” with its “hybrid of emotion and beauty” which she describes as at once “utterly repulsive, utterly astonishing.” And Saul himself is quite conscious of the challenge his work poses to the marketplace. “I never think about where the pictures are going to go,” the artist declares. “Will they be sold? Will someone want it? I’m pretty arrogant. I just say, ‘Hey, this is my art’...a real stuffy attitude.’ ”

Saul is no sentimentalist. But he is an idealist. He believes that the world can be made better but only if it is first exposed for what it is. And he does admit to being pleased when his work is appreciated, something that has been more frequent, according to him, in “recent years.” In this context, Yale’s purchase of his painting carries particular weight as an affirmation of the work's integrity that Gross admits is “difficult a lot of times,” with qualities “as physically challenging to aesthetic values as they are to moral values.”

In each print, as Jennifer Gross notes, “you can see how hard he works as an artist.” He is the “court reporter,” she says, who keeps the records for us of what we would rather not hear, “as offensive and truthful as they are.” These also record the artist’s practice which she anticipates will be “studied and taught from,” another measure of the gift's value. Through it, Saul can continue to have that pleasure he claims of never encountering "students he couldn’t talk to” at Yale.

For all its grotesquerie, something is always recognizably humane in Saul’s work. There are certain nightmares that we need to have on call for both their splendor and their outrage, and here they are. The simplest explanation of the gift is the gift itself. As Saul put it, “I’m glad to see these prints be somewhere, actually...I mean, why not? Why not?”

​

Painting with Ashes

[published October, 2012, Big, Red and Shiny]

Ahmed Alsoudani: MATRIX 165Wadsworth Atheneum, Hartford, CT,

Ahmed Alsoudani, Untitled, Charcoal and Acrylic on Canvas, 2011.

Charcoal is made by burning, so an artist might use slivers of charred ruins to draw with. Inthe midst of all the color, it is the prominence of this dark medium from out of the flames thatresonates most strongly in these works by Ahmed Alsoudani .

For all their scale (the largest is 72 x 108 in) these works document a grand history of pain invery small spaces. Inevitably, none of these pictures have titles. The dreadful realities whichthey draw from are unnamable, though familiar enough to those who have suffered what isnow called their “collateral damage.” They read as fragments of a continuous tapestry, partsof a single shattered narrative with a repetition of motifs – like Tolstoyʼs happy families, allwars are the same in their details, if not their dimensions.

There is no clear distinction between assembly and disassembly in the mosaics of debristhat each painting contains. These are portraits of mutilation, with mechanical and organicfragments laced together. Here are corpses on their journey to skeleton alongsideprosthetics for the soul with a miniature but ominous cluster of wrathʼs grapes in a corner.

The blurring of detail is a consequence of warʼs fog. It unexpectedly recalls theWillem de Kooning drawing erased by Robert Rauschenberg. With only traces of theoriginal remaining, Raucschenbergʼs erasure was an act of elemental destruction. But themore immediate tradition that these works depend on are the apocalyptic fantasies of the15th century painter Hieronymus Bosch. Here is the same jewelry of violence withornamental fragments of shrapnel, toothed and marvelous.

In another one of these paintings, the lost identities of body parts is a central subject,depicted in a confusion of what might be either animal or human. Here is the disembodiedagony of Gericaultʼs morgue studies, a shattered mirror with no visible reflection, and ductwork out of Terry Gilliamʼs Brazil, complex and useless. The backdrop to the composition isa frame of steel bars, as if all the world had become the immense prison that Hamletenvisioned.

One painting catalogues surveillance and interrogation, both anatomical and electronic,accompanied by the torturerʼs badge of rank and an homage to the technical precedent ofnails for crucifixion. In another image, the bureaucrat's dice echo Golgotha once again,alongside a suggestion of the deformed Joseph Merrick, that 19th century “Elephant Man”with its pointed reminder of whatʼs lost beneath the skin.

Anatomical specimens in their conventional glass jars are defiantly legible references in theindustrial laboratory of a painting where the machinery of Chaplinʼs Modern Times hasbeen put entirely in the service of malevolence, turned from producing widgets toweapons. Around the industrial landscape of this deformed Oz are scattered the remains ofthe Tin Woodsman and Scarecrow. The scattered scraps of colorful fabrics serve as theonly memorials of a recent suicide bombing or the 1991 immolation of hundreds of civiliansinside a shelter in the Amiriyah neighborhood of Baghdad. Game boards without pieces orplayers were the war makersʼ toys, but the playing is over and the damage done. Andwhat new destruction will hatch from these unbroken eggs in the lower center of the canvas?

In the United States, the memory of the violence that was the Iraq War is already at adistance, silenced and indistinct. But there are Iraqi artists whose work stands as a rebuke toour embrace of forgetfulness: Qasum Sabti, with his collages from fragments of burnedbooks found in the ruins of a library bombed early in the Iraq War, or Abdel-Karim Khalilwho carved a small marble figure in a purely Classical style, except with a prisonerʼs hoodpulled over its head. Alsoudani is another. Exile is no protection for an artist who records asclearly as he does what happened to the world he has left behind​

There is a telling difference between an irony imposed upon a landscape, and an irony discovered there. Robert Adams never imposes; with a kind of grace, he always reveals.

Anywhere that you look in this expansive exhibition, there is some transforming moment.

In an Eden, Colorado diner it is as if the world had exploded into light, flashing through windows onto ceilings and counters and an indifferent couple on stools, as if the end of the world hardly bore noticing.

In New Tracts, West Edge of Denver, Colorado a line of daylight marks the boundary of development. It is as if the construction schedule controlled the sun’s movement, illuminating the completed suburb, while leaving the unfinished buildings in shadow. Above them, adhesive clouds are like ornaments applied by a real estate salesman.

Two photographs made in Denver, Colorado are variations on a theme: one shows ordinary debris edging a restaurant’s border, its flattened grass like the straw of an abandoned crèche, while in the other, a child steps out of a car into a parking lot with its crushed cigarettes and tissues, all the wreckage of innocence. More ornamental trash surrounds a boulder anointed with house paint, like some beggar’s altar, in the image entitled Santa Ana Wash, San Bernardino County, California.

A Larimer County, Colorado, landscape manifests what looks like creation’s original brightness with its inherent resistance to acknowledging any history since. Along with time, space is stopped in its tracks, the conventional vanishing point of the horizon thwarted and twisted away

In one of Adams’ most recent photographs, taken on the Oregon coast, he records that unbearable light through a fog, more painful than on a clear day, which wrinkles the waves away from gravity.

While daylight takes most of his attention, there are moments of nighttime, such as the totem shadow of a roadside sign that is the only audience to a spot lit gas pump waiting to deliver its lines, and the rural carnival of Longmont Colorado, 1979 – a paradigm of the America which exults in seeing itself in bright defiance of the surrounding darkness, while its own wildly spinning machine is what actually threatens disaster.

Where we live is larger – and more transparent – than we think, if only we are willing to look at it “without blinking,” as Adams demands, and does.​

on Silas Finch

[July, 2012, for the artist]

A combination of Geppetto fashioning metal Pinocchios and Thomas Edison indifferent to utility, Silas Finch has a gift for re-imagining the curious debris of the ordinary world. His workshop is an archive of vaguely identifiable fragments that, once he plots the instructions for their assembly, become small, unofficial mysteries. The relationship of part to part is always unexpected, but never forced. Every joining point seems the result of a logical connection

He understands history’s machinery, traced on skateboard maps of violence with bullet track threads of gunfire and assassinations. But he also fashions animals for minor carousels, dwarf flying ships dangling beneath newspaper balloons, prosthetic limbs for carnival fortune tellers, and saw blade frames around found crucifixions.

Then he finds a dream of Emily Dickinson in a parachute dress, and outdoors, he lattices a tree with pruned branches for a fog trap.

Every one of his battered, artful constructions is an instrument for decoding memories – both his and ours.

New/Now: Marc Swanson[published May, 2012, Art New England]

New Britain Museum of American Art, New Britain, CT

All that glitters is not gold. “ True enough, but that expression is irrelevant to this alchemy of a show where the more common of stuff is both redeemed and celebrated. The worlds that Marc Swanson constructs are as inventive and melancholy as Joseph Cornell’s, though on a larger scale.

In Untitled (88 Box) tattered trophies evoke the fictional grandeur Bruce Springsteen’s song “Glory Days;” Untitled (Gold Box) contains gilded, broken dreams behind a bordello curtain; and Untitled (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof #2) has a still image of Paul Newman in a meditative moment as the character Brick in the film of the Tennessee Williams play. An unidentifiable marble bust in the background might be a memento mori for the dead actor.

The challenge of Untitled (Harold Box) is a demand for recognition of its reference toThe Boys in the Band, a 1968 play that depicted a catalogue of struggles for gay identity. Not so well known now, it is presented as an inaccessible private memory that was critical for the artist’s sense of himself. The chains that hang on its face read both as prize and constraint.

But Swanson works outside the box, as well, in the glass, enamel and glitter Boy in Tree with its suggestion of Huck Finn rendered as a Kara Walker silhouette, and the Untitled (Large Devotion Eyes Drawing), its many lined angles of vision like an exercise in Renaissance perspective framing the eyes plucked from St. Lucy, or hidden behind the mask of Venetian carnival; the looker looking, looked at.

On pedestals are Untitled (Jet Antler Pair), ritual artifacts from caves at Chauvet or Lascaux as prehistoric glam, and Untitled (Black Paper Wasp’s nest) of glass, ominously fragile, as if carbonized by fire. The centerpiece of the show, mounted high on a wall, is Untitled (Crystal, Hooking Left), a singular trophy animal from some Rhineland castle with its catalogues of slaughter. This is the mythic Christmas beast brought low, or Bambi’s dad deified in a glistening incarnation.

Circling inside this exhibition feels like a progress along a pilgrimage road lined with votive shrines, surrounded by voices of grief and thanksgiving.

What to do now that satire is dead? The realities of this society’s political and economic life are so grotesque in themselves as to apparently preclude any possibility of exaggeration. Nancy Chunn’s solution to this problem is a trick of fable; out of a story rendered apparently harmless by its over familiarity, she assembles comic catalogs of debris into altarpieces from a profane world.

Chunn has obviously made a commitment to documenting the rise and fall of our local empire entirely in domestic terms. In the bathroom are the cartoon disasters of overloaded electrical sockets, shelves of toxins, an infrastructure of roaches, fire dancing out of the wastebasket, and razor blades scattered on the floor – all waiting to fracture our pitiable daily routines. Alongside the bathtub with its sinking Titanic and a knife hand out of Hitchcock’s Psycho is the immeasurable terror of an empty toilet paper roll.

Then there is a fantasy of a boudoir with the skull on a vanity making literal the mortality paintings of the Renaissance vanitas and Hamlet’s instruction to what is left of Yorick the jester:

Now get you to my lady's chamber, and tell her, lether paint an inch thick, to this favour she must come...

And sure enough, Death is sitting nearby, next to the ubiquitous television whose fall from above to thwack the gullible fowl of the work’s title has set off the whole cascade of events Chunn is narrating, while another class of secret skeletons crowd out of the closet door in homage to an early Walt Disney cartoon of dancing bones.

The artist draws from a Walmart of imagery for her storytelling, some of the pictures out of both reach and sight as they are when we leave the gallery to be surrounded by the cacophony of the street. Our only certainty is in the repeated mantra of “as seen on tv” in its archaic black and white version of reality.

One exemplary panel may as well stand for all. With its cartoon duck under a street lamp, a small hand is just visible above the surface of a pond, “not waving but drowning.” Does Chunn have to tell us any more about our strange human comedy than that?

On the lids of sepulchers tucked along the aisles of Gothic cathedrals, marble mannequins sprawl in the customary myth of sleep rather than death. But the effigies that Susan Classen-Sullivan has fashioned are of unquestionable corpses, though amphibian rather than human, most of them inflated in scale, and not recumbent, but flung upright in all their rictus glory. These are the artist’s memorials to the multitudes of these creatures flattened on the deadly roads of early spring.

The splendid paradox here is that, though cadavers, they suggest animated stills from some oddly costumed line of Rockettes or Looney Tunes choreography or the flailing trance of a deaf mute in the second act of Waiting for Godot. And the accident of several tables and chairs, left temporarily behind in the gallery from a previous night’s reception, did briefly hint that a performance of Pina Bausch’s Café Müller was imminent, with a dancer about to throw the furniture out of the way of the silently wandering frogs.

Death does have its dance, after all, set in this case to imaginary music. But for all their grace and delicacy, there is a darkness to these solid ghosts, like the stone Commendatore who arises at the conclusion of Mozart’s Don Giovanni to drag the defiant sinner into hell. And though they are thwarted demons, with their threat rendered fragile by the porcelain of which they are fashioned, there is still something about them that leaves us grateful for their slaughter.

Two of the figures are rendered as only slightly larger than life (or death) size, each set alone on a wide expanse of wall. Within these dimensions, they become knickknacks of horror, or anguished toys, an encouragement to the smug confidence of the marketplace that here we have Nature at our mercy.

But do we indeed? There is another text that fills this particular room with its account of a landscape that “will swarm with frogs; they will make their way into your palace, into your bedroom, onto your bed, into the houses of your officials and subjects...” Perhaps it is the memory of that biblical plague at the end of which the dead animals were “piled up in heaps and the country stank” that reminds us of the consequences of human indifference to what the world requires of us. And these figures, stark beneath their spotlights, may be among the last of God’s warnings.

The Ants and the Cross: A Meditation on Catholic Censorship

[published January, 2012, The Catholic Worker]

The bishop was outraged. This might have been good news were it in response to the issue of torture or child abuse or warmaking, but none of these were mentioned. Rather, the prelate was provoked by a sequence of video images projected on a museum wall.

The artist David Wojnarowicz made the work that infuriated Bishop Nicholas A. DiMarzio. Entitled Fire In My Belly, it was included in the exhibition “Hide/Seek: Difference and Desire in American Portraiture” now at the Brooklyn Museum.

Late last year, when the same piece was on view at the National Portrait Gallery of the Smithsonian Institution in Washington D.C., there was a similar frenzy in response. The censorious Bill Donohue, president of the Catholic League, fulminated over it as “hate speech”... that attacked Christians... with.. ‘art.” The sequence in question showed a painted crucifix which had ants crawling over it, at which the faithful “might rightfully be offended.”

Donohue used the case as a basis to present his version of social justice, arguing that public funding for the arts should be ended since it “makes the working class pay for the leisure of the rich.” Gospel economics, to his mind, would be better reflected if tax moneys were used to underwrite professional wrestling, since that’s “what the working class enjoy,” and which apparently would not offend the moral sensibilities of certain Catholics who fled in horror from the Smithsonian galleries.

One hopes in vain for irony here.

Or from the new cardinal archbishop of New York who offered encomiums for Donahue’s work (“Keep at it, Bill!”), though he did al least hint at the possibility that “some might even discuss whether the image is offensive” at all. It is clear that none of those who reduce Wojnarowicz’s work to a mere “insult” actually saw the entire piece, of which the particular scenes they condemn take up only seconds.

If they had, they would have witnessed a moving procession of images revealing a world in which our everyday suffering is marked on the flesh of God, with a litany of saints as punctuation to the strange circus of suffering that surrounds us. For Wojnarowicz, the crucifixion is in the present, the blood still dripping, as is the price of betrayal with its cascades of coins. The most painful images are of an institutional hand sewing up both the prophet’s voice and the broken bread of the Eucharist. All these might have been occasions of grace for the angry bishops.

But hypocrisy is a renewable resource, and we are not often surprised by it. What cuts even deeper here, though, is not simply a double standard about what constitutes an offense to the faith. Desecration is certainly not impossible, but do we always recognize clearly where the sacred is most commonly abused?

What Wojnarowicz uncovered in his critics is that fear of the human that can be so disabling of the Gospel tradition. We are all challenged by the fragility of God incarnate, of that brief moment in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s film The Gospel According to Matthew when a fly flickers over the feet of Christ in the tomb. The ants scampering over the cross frighten us with our own doubts. But what is the point of our faith if we cannot confront them?

Finally, the bishops betray an almost nostalgic yearning for persecution in their protests. If only, they declare, the prejudice which Roman Catholics suffer in our society were seen to be equal to that faced by Muslims and Jews. Pathetic indeed is our situation if all we can offer as evidence of disdain is the work of an artist who, it turns out, is faithful to the core. How much better it would be if the institutional Church were to risk being persecuted for standing against war and on the side of the poor.

“Wooden” is now a cliché revised; it can no longer serve as a synonym for “unexpressive,” given what Ellsworth Kelly has made of it. This exhibition of more than half of Kelly’s works in wood is certainly a fit inaugural for the recently dedicated Linde Family Wing for Contemporary Art at the MFA. A nearly fifteen foot tall signpost of an untitled 1996 work in redwood, with a splatter of dark knots near its foot like traces of pilgrims’ offerings, stands at the entryway to what at first gives the appearance of a minimalist anthropological collection of curiosities whose purpose has been erased by mystery.

There is a horizon arc to almost every work here, and they bring the world we balance on into the room. Curve is the most frequent title, followed either by a Roman numeral or the name of some accompanying form. In XXXVII the grain does its own painting of a cloudscape traversing its shape; XL might be the headboard where Zeus is abed; XXI is a wedge of King Arthur’s table with sound wave diagrams plotted upon the surface. Kelly’s gift for drawing echoes in Curve XXXVIII with the double white stripe of the grain having the singular grace of his hand, and again in XLII with its zebra wood as if lined by graphite. A quartet of smaller pieces – Palm Relief, Form in Relief, Concorde I and II – suggest tabernacles in a rural church or door latches made to fit a Shaker stable.

There is no way to walk around the standing forms unless by edging through the narrow space behind each of them to the accompaniment of the motion detector alarms that would then erupt. These objects are deliberately diminished by being forced into what is almost a flat plane. But enough distance remains to reveal them for what they are – shadow makers, with an outrageous simplicity to their carpentry that depends heavily upon the lighting and orientation of this precisely designed installation.

One of the most moving, Curve XLIII with its whorled surface, suggests the lid of a slim giant’s coffin, perhaps the very one that saved Ishmael alone from the wrath of Moby Dick. Suddenly, I could imagine all these sculptures as planks of rescue washed up on heaven’s beach.

Is there any painter more American than John Marin? Could he have possibly come from anywhere else? There is a madcap self-confidence to him from near the beginning. By 1936, with watercolor and graphite laid over the rough surfaced paper of River Front, Lower Manhattan he was producing a fractured, heaped up animation of the city, with buildings as mobile as pedestrians.

But when he establishes himself on the Maine coast in the 1930’s, he confronts that demand for depicting the sea which invites convention, and makes all of his work a record of resisting it.

The theater footlights and proscenium of Dead Trees and Sea, a 1934 watercolor, carry through to the oil on canvas of Movement: Sea, Ultramarine and Green; Sky, Cerulean and Grey, 1947, where the only sun is on the water’s surface, and then reappears again in another oil of 1952,The Written Sea, where what is obviously the calligraphy of the surf billows under the sky’s arch as if part of a theater set piece where painted cardboard waves are shifted back and forth and the red slashes at the lower edge of the canvas are like the fall of a curtain. The painted and carved frames that Marin fashioned for the latter two works are anti-decorations, structures for constantly revising the pictures they enclose.

In a 1940 letter to Alfred Steiglitz, Marin writes that “when man who uses material to the glorification of – Self – he’s damned.” Is there no self in his own art? The prominence of gesture is the absolute presence of the artist, but not glorified by being separated from what is the strict humanity of Marin’s painting. One of the wonderful mysteries of his work is how the the early thick surfaces, even in those where the shifts of Cubist angles edge themselves into the picture plane, are reduced to the spare, complete style of his later painting.

This fulsome exhibition is an obvious image of the artist. Always so much himself, he was the personification of what this country has been at its best: clear, inventive, and attuned to the world at large

Within the show, a small, scattered album of portraits by several photographers offers Marin in multiple guises: by Paul Strand, as if he were J. Robert Oppenheimer, in Irving Penn’s photo a little like Oscar Wilde had he survived into old age, and Arnold Newman’s version of him as having the look of a partially domesticated drag queen. Like Walt Whitman, that other peculiarly American genius, Marin contains multitudes.

There are two artists at work in Walker Evans’ image of a Garage in Southern City Outskirts, from 1936: the photographer with his unerring sense of subject, and the unnamed manipulator of found objects whose arrangement of tires, tubes, wheels and hubcaps in the splendid clutter of the picture shows a comic sensibility at work.

Evans had a particular affinity for such collaborators, among them the sign painters and billboard designers whose instructions and advertising create a parallel universe that once visibly accompanied ordinary life. Their traces make up one of Evans’ most notable catalogs.

Another is those assemblages of exquisite junk which also drew his attention, whether in a crowded Pennsylvania auto graveyard where the tree line horizon marks the boundary to a paradise of walkers, or a single abandoned car in a Connecticut field, its ornamental chrome radiator shell perfectly reflecting the disaster that has befallen it.

In a 1962 Fortune magazine essay accompanying several of these splendidly recorded wrecks which he describes as if they were “the effect of some evil prank,” Evans’ schadenfreude is clearly evident. He takes a real “delight” in “the surprises and the mockery” of these wrecks, noting that “At times, nothing could be gayer than the complete collapse of our fanciest contrivances.” The same insight would apply to the derelict Breakfast Room at Belle Grove Plantation from 1935 with its peeling Corinthian pilasters and broken lath protruding from the ceiling.

But a different typology of loss emerges in his portraits of southern “Primitive Churches” where these isolated buildings make audible the buzz of racial violence that surrounded them, and from which they were the only sanctuary.

That there is no particular argument to this exhibit should be read as a virtue of sorts. It can be entered at any point, unconfined by either chronological or analytic baggage. It is the outline of a retrospective punctuated by surprises, as in the 1946 photograph of Women Shoppers, Randolph Street, Chicago with its face to face awareness of being a subject behind the sunglasses. These pictures that are unfamiliar are as good as any of those that have become iconic, and remind you that everything Evans did is worth looking at.

Small Windows onto Large Worlds

[published December, 2011, Artes ]

Barkley Hendricks: Some LIke It Hot‘The William Benton Museum of Art, University of Connecticut

Before even seeing it, I made a judgment on this show. And I was right. The landscapes that Barkley Hendricks has made are revelatory in ways so precise and disarming that they trained me instantly. An enlarged capacity to respond to them was guaranteed simply by looking.

Eleven of these scenes share a single tight space in the gallery. Not crowded, the varied shapes of the canvases obviously invite congregation, like an assemblage of mezzotints on a Victorian parlor wall. Each tondo and oval and lunette are like shifting images in a lantern slide show introducing a distant country to a dazzled audience.

This is Jamaica, but it is also resonant of Vietnam or any colonial landscape with violence just beneath its fantasy of paradise. On one canvas where a unpainted edge reveals the impasto around it, there is a literal equivalent to the many strata of memory that the surfaces of things can keep from us. But the process of exposing this underground is not all the work of nature; Hendricks is reading excavation, and not erosion, in the piece entitled “My Back to the Bulldozer.” The machine is made visible by the damage it has done. One single gouge of red earth across a wounded field tells the story of every other ravaged ground. A human mark has remade in the earth, and is now remarked by the hand of the painter.

These multiple small panels move the observer from stone to meadow to surf to darkening clouds, all the fragments from which the world is assembled. But each one is as complete in itself as any of John Constable’s studies for patches of sky. A separate series of larger watercolors achieves a similar effect by different means. In both “Turquoise Sky” and “Three Trees, ” the thin edge of a verdant horizon forces the eye up to the airy processions that push out over the paper’s end.

Two of Hendricks’ signature full length portraits are hung at either side of the landscape grouping, making a frame out of another of the artist’s visions of the world. Set apart that way, they even more emphatically evoke the tradition which celebrates those figures of self-confident splendor found in the court paintings of Goya and Thomas Lawrence.

There is a further variation on that theme in two large format color photographs (“The Twins” and “Swimming Pool Attendant”) which go beyond being a record of a tourist’s encounter – or an anthropologist’s – to measure out the balance of stance and demeanor in the human figure. They are a reminder that the mysteries of affect have long been one of this artist’s central subjects.

Another grouping of work assembles a small constellation of unfamiliar fruits, and although only one of them includes the term “erotic” in its title (and suggested by its framing) all of them are sensually charged, their taste and smell made tactile. But these are not Nature’s version of adult toys. Rather, they might serve as sexual reliquaries or votives – especially where the image is touched with gold leaf – small but deeply felt prayers of thanks for passion’s gift.

There is thanksgiving, too, in the banana leaves which are both botanical record and exercises in form. That these are domesticated plants is a surprise revealed in the delicate pencil outline of their clay pots.

But for all the varieties of mastery here, the landscapes are what I went to again before I left, making sure of my remembering. There should be room for them in anyone’s memory.

A traveling theatre company has apparently abandoned its painted sets, the pieces scattered and initially indecipherable, as if left behind in some refugee rush from approaching bombers. But gradually scenes begin to emerge; tableaux vivants et morts, that can be imagined out of this curious lumber. The elements of these sculptures were fashioned by Jessica Stockholder, in collaboration with both a cabinetmaker and a screenprinter, from the remains of a tree cut down on the museum’s property. Although Stockholder has alluded to the totems of the Pacific Northwest she recalls from her childhood in Vancouver as one of her quotations here, there is an equally clear echo of New Guinea ceremonial boards, just barely three dimensional, with their mysterious geometry patterned on flat wooden surfaces.

These might also be ranks of amateur shields, awaiting the supernumeraries of some Wagnerian free-for-all on a cramped stage, or the clapboards for an artful witch’s trap of a cottage, lacking only the oversize candy cane portico. And then they might be the four-sided cases of wooden organ pipes, a pale wash over their surfaces marked by vaguely musical notations.

Another assemblage treats the planks as paper at its most primitive, a surface for printing even before it is turned to pulp. The lettered panels suggest coded instructions for assembly, with several alphabet characters repeated, and others singular. The suspicion arises that they may have been deliberately altered, as in the Buster Keaton film where mislabeled boxes for a housebuilding kit yield a German Expressionist tenement with doors opening onto thin air.

In the largest gallery, hinged forms are more slabs than screens with large Matisse-like cut outs giving them a punctured art deco look, like a jigsaw puzzle for a giant’s toddler. I wondered what would happen if the pieces of this installation were individually sold and scattered like some anthropologist's relics, lost to their tribe. Where would the presiding spirit of the tree now take up habitation?

But in that same large space, convex mirrors, with their benevolent surveillance, revise the room. In the curved glass reflection of a section of drop ceiling with a painted eclipse at its center, you can just make out the tree’s ghost, relocated and satisfied.

Michael Oatman, All Utopias Fell: The Shining, The Library of the Sun and Codex SolisMASS MoCA, North Adams, MA

Long term installation open seasonally, May through October

There is no explanation for Michael Oatman’s All Utopias Fell. To adequately describe it, it would be necessary to reproduce it. Even the conventional term for a multimedia site specific work is useless. There is, instead, a story. And that is the central wonder of what Oatman has made. As he described it in a recent conversation, “I’ve struggled for years how to tell people what I’m doing because the word ‘installation’ is so annoyingly generic. I felt like I was writing novels, but instead of using words I was using objects.” Because he was “first really moved by writing...finding some other way to do it became the goal.”As a result, he “began gravitating towards materials that had a past life ...to start with something that had already been inscribed in some way, ” and then, with what he gathered, have “a conversation across history with materials and places and people.” That sense of discovery yields a work chock full of the world it imagines. Although an Airstream trailer, resonant of the future as the past thought it would be, is at the center of the piece, it turns out to be only one fragment of the story.“Every part of the object had to have some significance,” Oatman declares. “It wasn’t just making an image” that he was after. Rather, he thinks of his “role as an artist as not much more sophisticated than finding something very cool and passing it on to people that I think might be interested in it... because I like making things... and extrapolating fictions out of them.”Machines of course raise unique issues about what is fictional. Grounded in a working mechanism as this is, the lying is different. This work is functional – its solar panels do power all its interior gadgets – even if not functional in the way it purports to have been. But it is the efficient setting for its creator’s history. The artist learned to become this character, a “self-taught engineer who built this,” and “to make decisions, not as Michael Oatman, but as Donald Carusi, vernacular rocket builder.”Comparing it to his earlier work, Oatman reveals that “unlike my collages and a lot of my other installations this one was a nightmare of figuring out the order of building things...we had to have electrical stuff that really worked...just the order of what do you put on when...in some ways it was really easy to get into the mind set of this guy building the ship because I had to do it...it wasn’t just theatrical.” Fair enough, although the making of the piece and the performance of making the piece are clearly impossible to disentangle.Over the long period of thinking about and fashioning the work Oatman had “ time to be in here...to let things happen, not always be making them aggressively...accidents take over...I’d find something new then I’d rip out something and replace it thinking this is what Carusi would have done. It’s clearly not from a kit...it’s pretty much made moment to moment because that’s the way he made it.”But there is not simply a single narrative thread here. Biography is always companion to the fiction. “My story - how it intersects with the objects - has become very important,” Oatman says. It is clear enough that the central subject of the work is the making of it, and not the result. For Oatman, there are qualities to the work “that are absolutely not present for the audience - people who come and visit the piece - but for me they’re the things I need in order to make something.” Oatman admits to having “been engaged for a long time with still life and the kind of meanings you get in Northern Renaissance paintings - the idea of the vanitas - paintings that are about a biography of objects - and the maker.”At the same time, he is prompt to note that “I don’t need for everyone to have the depth of my experience...I’m not even convinced that people don’t have better experiences than I do when they come in here.” With some relief, Oatman reveals that since “I’ve spent four years making this it’s a pretty big part of what I am now...it was also really time to let it land and know that I could walk away.” As his alter ego Donald Carusi also did, apparently, But other life histories can now be written into the fabric of the work. As has been the case with a number of his earlier installations, Oatman notes that “things happen to them...things get stolen, people leave stuff, which is always fascinating...this kind of art making has a very deliberate public component...people begin to claim it, somehow incorporate it into their history of being a viewer.” Rather than bridle at these alterations, Oatman has accepted them, convinced that “whatever comes through the door and whatever people bring in becomes part of its story, so I stopped worrying about certain things after a point, figuring like that was going to make it better.”One of Oatmans’s abiding commitments is that “when I make stuff I want my viewers to have the same experience I have when I’m a viewer, really being drawn into the world of what somebody is making...I want to have questions about how it’s made and if the larger narrative doesn’t suffer even when I ask those questions then I know it’s something really powerful ...That’s something I kept in front of me when I made this.”This is the case even though there are numerous associations which the artist has with the work which are invisible to others and would not inevitably be elicited, even by direct questions. “I used to just worry about spilling the beans, and it’s ridiculous. There are so many ways you can come at any work of art. I for a while did have a certain moratorium talking about this...I wouldn’t even acknowledge I was working on something. But then, after a while, you get the thing up in the air and people are like, ‘What is that?’” At that point, although “it’s interesting working on a secret...after a while you want to tell somebody.”Anyone encountering this work will most certainly overlook something. Be assured that it will not be the only thing that matters. Oatman’s position on this is clear: “If there is something you missed and my work would not be a success -I’m not interested in making that. “ And he does not.

Puzzle Palace [published July, 2011, Art New England]

Ursula von Rydingsvard: Workingby Patricia C. Phillips

Words are the problem. This is not entirely a cliché, particularly in regard to writing about art, and this recent monograph is a case study for some of the ways in which language can defeat its subject, in spite of a writer’s passion and intention. There is a special desperation to finding ways of making works of visual art appear through an apt choice of terms. The effort always shares in both redundancy and failure, since the subject is already visible by definition, and through a medium which rejects language as a device for expression. Even those who include text in their painting, as in Magritte’s “Ceci n'est pas une pipe”, always reduce it to a state of servitude.It is an especially fraught enterprise for a writer to approach the work of an artist such as Ursula von Rydingsvard. Given that the dimensions of sculpture have so much more of the real world in them, their demands for formulas of description are accordingly different than they are with painting, where depth is largely a matter of illusion.If sculpture has its own codes, the choice of keys for deciphering them lies between the language of definitions and the language of experience, between the adjective and the figurative. Patricia C. Phillips chooses the rules of the dictionary over the demands upon the imagination that von Rydingsvard makes. And so, she writes of the wall construction Zakopane that it is “Both a protecting place and impervious screen, a conditional occupancy of bodies in an unsettling and disquieting situation of hunched, hushed piety releases an animated dynamic of the profane and sacred in the seductive spatial enigma and constitutive darkness of the work.”This verges on being a parody of its subject, a paste of prose almost as thick and coruscated as the piece itself. It is always possible to say too much about what matters most, but Philips is not simply being prolix. There is a particular anxiety that comes with the desire to be absolutely comprehensive, and it impedes Philips’ ability to focus on the actual encounter with individual works.Instead, there are Zen-like koans without a context. When it is claimed that one of von Rydingsvard’s sculptures is “easy to identify but impossible to know,” what does this mean, if true? Or else, there is a litany of “both...and” conjunctions, as in “both present and missing,” “both natural and industrial,” “both a return and dramatic departure.” These read, not as a catalogue of multiple meanings, but as equivocations or evasive paradoxes that are a disguise for uncertainty.This is not the only evidence of Philips’ inclination to have things both ways. She insists that von Rydingsvard’s work is “never explicitly autobiographical, ”yet then goes on to heap up details of personal history, especially in regard to the artist’s father, which make more than an implicit psychoanalytical argument.Given what Philips suggests is a long, personal relationship with von Rydingsvard, what is one to make of those documentary details qualified with the word “perhaps” which one assumes the artist could have either confirmed or denied? Is it the sculptor who was reluctant to be specific, or the interrogator? Is it only an artificial mystery to present a anecdote about the shaping of the design for a site-specific work using the children’s song “Skip to My Lou” as being “reportedly” what occurred, when it must be assumed that von Rydingsvard was present and would have some memory of the event?It is a surprise when, at the very end of the commentary, some flashes of figurative insight appear, reinforcing the impression that, had there been others like them, this might have been a more provocative study. Certainly there were opportunities enough. The book opens with a prelude of images with which the text that follows never comes to terms. Here is the artist in the midst of her toxic labor, masked with a respirator against the cedar dust or encased in a hazmat suit as she anoints the surfaces of the wood with graphite. Here is the inheritance of mediaeval rood screens and cathedral vaults with the interrupted columns of a basalt cliff, the surfaces of woodcut blocks and Lithuanian pillar crosses with their carved intricacies, or giant cylinder seals made to roll across and impress a landscape. These are among the materials of experience out of which one might fashion a recognition of such mysterious and demanding creations.Who, then, makes up the imagined audience for this book? Those who already know von Rydingsvard’s art would want it as a memory catalogue, with its profusion of carefully printed images. But for those for whom the artist is yet only a name, the current display of her sculpture at the DeCordova Museum in Lincoln, MA, on view through August 28, is the place to begin. You will not need a glossary there.

Heads emerged from the murk in the first of Catherine Opie’s photographs I ever saw, of surfers just offshore, looking as if they were floating in one of Dante’s circles of perdition. In several of the examples of her more recent work included in this exhibition, we are far from land, and the swimmers have all vanished. These portraits of the horizon at dawn and dusk are Opie’s calendar of a voyage across the Pacific aboard a container vessel, with its merchandise afloat.

As we focus on the glittering, broken ship of the sun in one image and a seared panoply of clouds in another, there is the unnerving sense of the ocean circling behind us. The beginning and end of this journey register as nearly identical, with the only two views of land in the series being of the commercial ports with their cranes like moveable Gothic buttresses poised to sink into the waters just beyond the docks.

Very different panoramas of public protest and celebration make up the other narrative of this show. These spectacularly audible events are here reduced to silence, with the debris of the inauguration in one photograph strewn in front of a large outdoor television screen on which the president and his wife appear, their victory already registered as fragile and transient. The individual portraits which Opie draws from the crowd reveal faces uncertain of their joy, as if a more miserable future were already being written, as it it is in the Tea Party gatherings which Opie also records. In one of those images, a man wears a three-sided hat, more cheese wedge than tricorn, with “I didn’t vote for this Obamanation” inscribed on it, and tea bags dangling from each of its corners. One wants the effect to be comic. It is not.

Then there are the confounding contrasts of a boy scout jamboree with its regimented shelters in an open field, arranged as if for a gathering of professional refugees, and a women’s music festival with its scattershot encampment crammed into recognizable woods. The unstudied nudity of the women in one photograph is reclaimed from Manet’s Le déjeuner sur l'herbe, its male figures discarded, while another image of a mob of uniformed adolescents is redolent of the HItler Youth rather than Woodstock.

As dense with crowds as some of Opie’s pictures are, there is more emptiness to be found in them than in those she made of the open and endless sea.

Beautiful Enemies: An Artist Makes Friends

[published January, 2011, Artes]

On Becoming an Artist: Isamu Noguchi and His Contemporaries, 1922-1960The Noguchi Museum, Long Island City, NY

There is an art to friendship, and especially to friendships among artists. In an 1841 essay now seldom read, Ralph Waldo Emerson defined a friend as an apparent contradiction, a “sort of beautiful enemy, untamable, devoutly revered, and not a trivial conveniency...,” but ultimately important in revealing you to yourself.

Although, in his 1927 application for a Guggenheim Fellowship, Isamu Noguchi proclaimed for his art a “desire to view nature through nature’s eyes and to ignore man as an object of special veneration,” the evidence displayed is here that he was closer to the 19th century writer in fashioning a wide circle of acquaintance where he expected, as Emerson did, to find his own identity confirmed.

This exhibition, with its expansive taxonomy of friendships, raises the question of a particular artist’s community in ways that are alternately poignant and unnerving. The album of biographies which serves as a lesser catalogue to the exhibition invites a negotiation between art and ephemera that does not always spare Noguchi’s works from being taken as simple illustrations to the narrative of his relationships.

But there are shorter stories within the larger one that leave the art to itself. Miss Expanding Universe, 1932, a figure pitching itself into space with entire confidence, finds its contrast in Death (Lynched Figure) 1934 with its rictus of metal. But biography reasserts itself in Frida Kahlo’s Suicide of Dorothy Hale, 1939. Kahlo’s relationship with Noguchi brings her here, as does Noguchi’s intimacy with the suicide. Kahlo makes a memorial that evokes some 15th century Sienese painting of a saint’s life, collapsing time and space in a woman’s leap to her death.

In Brancusi’s Paris studio in 1927 there is another story, where Noguchi begins his practice of association as well as sculpture. This is a moment well before our current notions of network and contact that turn personal alliances into mechanics. For all that seems obvious about his inheritance from Brancusi, it is Noguchi’s figurative devotions that are full of surprise (and one more betrayal of his Guggenheim oath).

A bust of Buckminster Fuller in 1929 is a chrome perfection of a portrait all on the surface. His rendering of the art dealer Julien Levy in the same year looks as if it has borrowed from Eric Kennington’s bronze memorial to Lawrence of Arabia in the cellar of St.Paul’s Cathedral. And his Uncle Takagi of 1931 finds him in a larger, painful world of age and loss.Noguchi also writes his story on the landscape. Or hopes to. His model for a Play Mountain, in 1933 with its combination of Aztec temple and Roman amphitheater is never built, but one can imagine Maya Lin learning from it how to make a cross section of sorrow. The Riverside Park Playground of 1965 is a final model for another unrealized project . Like some ancient palace recently uncovered, it would have invented a distant past for a city without one.

But his Garden (Pyramid, Sun and Cube) in the plaza fronting the Beinecke Library at Yale University is constructed in 1963. For anyone familiar with the full scale piece, the model of it here provides the shock of the miniature, especially as it presents contrasting surfaces separating the two standing forms from the low pyramid and the base. At Yale, the work is entirely of marble in a single range of color. Similarly provocative are two earlier proposals Noguchi made for the same sunken space: one, a crater and its inverse; the other, a puddling and bubbling duo of lava forms.

In red stoneware, The Apartment of 1952 is not a model, save as it evokes the miniature towers of Han dynasty tomb ware as well as some Giacometti tenement. Noguchi’s furniture has even more to say about city life, with a prismatic table of 1957 with its aluminum shapes to solve the puzzle of a one bedroom studio and a marble top table with metal bowl insert for some domestic liturgy or curious game of chance.

But perhaps these interior fragments are all that he could manage of a convivial world, in which chat is a small, meaningful privilege, like writing to Ginger Rogers (he is carving her portrait) from the internment camp for Japanese-Americans in Poston, Arizona where he is the sole voluntary prisoner. But he also makes of that time in 1943 the sculpture My Arizona , with its defiled breasts of a murderous mother country who sends her children into the desert to die.

The chart on display which details the extended genealogy of Noguchi’s relationships has something of the six degrees of separation mantra attached to it. But the clearer image of what price the artist pays for human connection is a 1939 Berenice Abbot photograph of him, clutching his sculpture Glad Day with one hand, his other arm in a plaster cast. What he makes of others, remakes him. Emerson would have understood.

Evolution: Five Decades of Printmaking by David C. Driskell,Part I, Printmaking from 1952 to 1999, Part II, Printmaking from 2000 to 2007 [published January, 2011, Art New England]

Where is Africa now? There is a diaspora in every one of David Driskell’s prints, but it is never rendered as a thwarted past. It is, rather, absolutely of the moment, reinventing everything it encounters. There is a permanence of ghosts in the lithograph Ancestral Images, The Forest, threading through the present. Even the common houseplants of Thelma Festival and In the Shadow assert their inheritance of the African landscape. In Ancient Totems, the apparent abstraction is the wilderness overlaid with its own resilience.

Although work he makes during the middle 1950’s contains no documentary reference to the ongoing witness of the Montgomery Bus Boycott, he makes clear the reality of the world in which that struggle is taking place. In Watermelon (1956) the seeds are like dragon’s teeth waiting for the harvest of violence; Raven and Owl (1955) with the carrion bird tinted red, pits wisdom against death; and Figures in the Rain (1955) could evoke a protest march or a funeral crowd.

He finds material fit for reimagining everywhere, from the comic eyes of Northwest Coast Indian masks in Jonah in the Whale, to the stylized scales of The Fish out of a mediaeval bestiary, and then the animated geometry of Matisse’s cut paper in Dancer II.

In the series of variations on Eve and the Apple that date from 1967 through 2007, both the brightness and the darkness of the image become progressively more pronounced in the later versions, as if the the weight of the story grew in the repeating. In each rendering, Eve stretches her hand across her breasts in the modesty learned from the Fall.

In Bakota Girl , there is the vocabulary of a Christian icon with its variegated halo, as well as the perfection of a mask found in the 1907 Head of a Woman by Picasso now at the Barnes Foundation. As in Les Demoiselles d'Avignon, the vocabulary of that smaller painting was taken by Picasso from Africa.In his woodcut, Driskell returns the image to its origins, leaving its cubist transformation intact.

A restoration that can still celebrate what has been changed is characteristic of Driskell's defining insight that beauty is the companion of justice.

Across from the salt marshes that Antonio Frasconi can see from his studio, a power plant prints a dark slab against the sky. That precise blot on the landscape does not register in all the woodcuts he has made of that view. But there are several, more singular, where Frasconi acknowledges the building’s ominous bulk, and, as he transforms it, defies it.

This simply confirms his matter-of-fact assertion that, as an artist, ”you have to tell the truth.” “I like to do pretty pictures, too” he says, but given what the world is, it is crucial to “do something about it.”

And so, the first words in our conversation were about politics, not simply because of the imminent elections, but because he is manifestly a political man who believes that “you can’t ignore the stuff going on.”

On the other hand, he is not sanguine about his expectations of artists faced with the ideological frenzies of our time. He has “never had any hope for artists having political consciousness.” They “generally don’t care,” he says, “as long as they can sell one or two things.”

Although he emigrated from Argentina soon after the Second World War, Frasconi has retained his sense of standing outside of American culture. His bemused rhetorical question of “what does it mean?” about the rise of the Tea Party leads him finally to conclude that “American people are really strange.”

But the other evidence he offers of “what a strange country this is” is the fact that “I think I told the truth and I could sell it.” This surprised him. He suspects that he “came at the right time’ in the 1950’s and 1960’s when demand for the kind of graphic clarity he was capable of led to multiple commissions for book covers to Doubleday Anchor paperbacks and jackets for Caedmon spoken word recordings. I discovered that a copy of André Gide’s The Counterfeiters which I kept for many years largely because of its cover illustration was his work.

Although he had received a scholarship to study with the German political artist George Grosz, he arrived just after Grosz returned to Berlin, ending his wartime exile in the United States. Enrolled at the Art Students’ League in New York FRasconi “used to meet to wash brushes” with Leona Pierce, whom he would later marry. He remembers one of her first instructions to him as “Don’t be so mad.” And he learned from her woodcut style, and her ability to be “surprised about the world of children, building things in the street.” They had adjoining studios in their Connecticut home until her death in 2002.

Other artists who have mattered to him include the illustrator and printer Joseph Low, and Fritz Eichenberg, a “good friend,” whose wood engraving, sharp on the page, made a “popular” art in its most accessible and activist sense for the Catholic Worker newspaper.

There is something of an abiding American dream reflected in Frasconi’s still palpable pleasure at having been able to “live and raise a family and buy a house.” But money still seems “too big for a small man to bother about it.“ Art has become the possession of the merchants: “They win everything,” and “not for beauty.”

Perhaps that is why he declares that he is “not interested in art anymore.” Now it is a matter of “anything to entertain me.” “It’s very hard to find a dealer” these days, but “I’m not looking,” he says. Instead, at the age of 92, “I just work a lot.”

His blocks appear and reappear, like the bird clouds in his Migration series from 2002 -2003, as pieces of a moveable puzzle reassembled in alternative solutions. Although his early work avoided color out of his fear of creating decoration, he now names his exercise as “painting with woodcuts.” Marshlands are a spectrum of slashes across several of these prints, in one of which a boat like a skeleton coracle, abandoned or lost, reads as an arrogant watermark. And in the piece “Norwalk After Rain,” made this year, the wet world is bright with mud and life pressed out from the surface of the print.

Here Frasconi has followed his rule of finding “ a paper that you can do anything to,” while he continues the tradition begun with using pasta made by his parents to impress an image on the sheet. This is how he came to his embracing claim that “anything that has relief you can print from,” including stems of marsh grass glued to a wooden panel.

When he quietly declares that “my best time is not anymore” he is clearly not talking about living in desperation. Rather there is a sense of him simply working against the weight of mortality and looking forward to an upcoming exhibition in the place where he lives of work made about that place – the rare prophet honored in his own hometown.

Many of the pieces that will be included in that show have dedications in his wife’s name, and her absence is what he describes as “another aspect of me.” But “I have the discipline,” he says of his print making; that is “the only way you can go on.” This does not mean that he is confounded by perfection. It is still the case that “if Rouault burned his work I can do that, too.” He is not finished yet.Leona Pierce and Antonio Frasconi: WoodcutsCenter for Contemporary Printmaking, Norwalk, CT

The Surprise of the Thing: Robert Taplin’s Way of Sculpture

[published November, 2010, Art New England]

There are bodies in crates inside Robert Taplin’s studio. But this is no laboratory of sinister purpose, though to see Taplin leaning over his newest sculpture like an enraptured anatomist might suggest otherwise. These wrapped figures are exercises in the relationship between stuff and story that has been the sculptor’s most provocative subject of late.Given that much of figurative sculpture is funerary, Taplin sees in it “a substitute body for the dead” and not merely an “object to be looked at.” The tension between memorial and material should not be resolved by viewing the work, in Taplin’s words “as just a thing.”He speaks of a visit to Arles where the Romanesque sculpture of its cathedral moved him “partly because it’s architectural...it enforces a physical body type of looking,” but also by its quality of being “narratively and emotionally driven.” This is also what appeals to him in Indian sculpture, which is “highly naturalistic in narrative ways.” Here the emotional tone is quite formalized; its practitioners “never try to fool you about verisimilitude.”The human forms which emerge in this studio are rarely at life size. “From my point of view,” says Taplin, “ scale is very malleable.” There is an Alice in Wonderland effect that alters a viewer’s body image in an encounter with any figurative sculpture. One grows or shrinks imaginatively as a way of getting a bodily sense of the work, to “feel Marcus Aurelius on that horse.” With a Giacometti figure, the exercise can result in vertigo. “Very disconcerting,“ agrees the sculptor.Taplin’s approach to the question of realism is philosophical, as well as sculptural. Mistaking the representation for reality as in the furious reaction to the editorial cartoons depicting the prophet Mohammed is obviously to go too far, but for Taplin “as an artist, [there is] nothing left to fight with if representations are meaningless.” Describing himself as a “conditional realist,” he argues that “representation does have something to do with reality.” The relationship may be changeable, but it is not illusory. “Representations are living things that you use to negotiate the environment” according to Taplin; without them, “you are helpless.”Taplin refuses the view that “the only reasonable attitude towards representation is skepticism.” Rather, he is willing to “accept the flawed aspect,” and create art that encompasses the idea of imperfection. There is no perfect realism. There is something to this of St. Paul’s claim that we see only as “in a mirror, darkly.” Taplin acknowledges that “most of the art I’m interested in is religious and I’m not religious,” preferring to describe the issue for him as a matter of “consciousness.”But even as he clears the theology away, his training in theatre design and medieval studies resonates in his recent work. In one corner of the former industrial space that is his studio are the boxed stages containing his series of meditations on Dante, Everything Imagined Is Real. Taplin was clear that he “wasn’t going to illustrate the Inferno, “ but rather, he “wanted to extract something personal.” With these miniature tableaus frozen in one moment of performance, he carefully chose to reverse terms of the pilgrimage. “In my hell,” he says, “everyone is innocent, the guilt is on you the viewer, the Dante.” His hell is also recognizably nearby. In each of these small theatres there is a landscape of the moment, such as the war ravaged city street that is the first gateway to the damned.Taplin undertook a series of narratives with a reimagined Punch some five years ago. Fashioned of urethane resin, they have the look of wax, or of 15th century French alabaster tomb figures, giving a delicacy to the small monster in his several guises. The sculptor describes the response to the traditional comic figure as a paradoxical “kind of envious; kind of appalled.” Taplin recognizes the “needling aspect of these sculptures” which emerge in the conflicting questions which they provoke: “shouldn’t he be guilty?” or, rather, “should I feel like him...guiltless?” In the piece entitled “Punch Stopped at the Border,” the sculptor has in mind what he calls “the de Sade question” being put to society. “Should this libertine be locked up or not?” Is he a threat to order, or in its service as a study in contrast? Is Punch a warning or an invitation?Taplin’s sculpture reads with a “wonderful ambiguity” for Richard Klein, exhibitions director at the Aldrich Museum, where a eleven foot tall rendering of “The Young Punch Goes Shopping with His Mother” which the artist has specifically fashioned for an outdoor site there, is on view through March 20, 2011. Klein anticipates a vigorous response to what he describes as Taplin’s “alive and breathing” work.But Punch is also a challenge as a public monument. In conversation, Taplin recalled a poem by Robert Haas which evokes the ordinary guilt that Punch is incapable of, giving him all the threatening power of the circus clown. Yet Haas further argues that “where shame lives” is also where we learn “a certain practical cunning, and what a theater is, and the ability to lie.” These are all the defining skills of art making, and though Punch may be shameless, he is an artist, too.Perhaps that is what also draws Taplin to this trickster as a subject. As he works to assemble the armature and wiring that will light the figures from within, without knowing exactly what the final effect will actually be, he is fashioning a surprise for himself. Punch would gleefully approve.Robert Taplin: Main Street Sculpture ProjectAldrich Gallery, Ridgefield, CTOctober 30, 2010 through March 20, 2011

Facing Up to It: Warhol and His Inheritors[published October, 2010, Artes]

Who is and who isn’t? What is identity’s price? These are Warhol questions. And the ways in which he poses them are no less charged now, nearly twenty-four years since his death.

Here is a part of the diaspora of images created by the Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts when it chose from among the thousands of photographs that Warhol produced to make a series of gifts to art collections throughout the country, the Housatonic Museum of Art being one of them.

But Terri C. Smith, the curator of this exhibit, has no interest in a mere celebration of good fortune. The donation is not the only subject here. Rather, Smith has worked to create an expressive history, using other elements from Warhol’s own larger project along with the work of current artists who are now playing variations on his inventiveness.

Part of the power of what is on display here is that it does not treat Warhol as an artifact. There is more and more to him at every new reading of the work, and our own time keeps looking back at us out of what he found. One tradition at work here is that of Ingres, with his relentless categorizing of social flair and dismay. But as critical as Warhol’s eye could be, he never lacked for empathy.

There is a Roman Catholic framing of the world with these Polaroid ranks of votive images, in each of which he saw something of his own self, and in which he demands that we see something of ours. That is where the real matter of recognition lies. Among his subjects, does it matter that I know who Rick Ocasek is, but not Anne Basse? And what of the collection of the “unidentified,” among which is obviously a group of waiters who are unknown almost by definition. But there is a democracy to the visual presence that Warhol grants them. Even without names, they are declared as individuals.

As also are the children whom he portrays as sympathetically human. These are not Diane Arbus’s demons, even though they are not innocent. And he manages the same equanimity in his treatment of objects, as with a knife, more a cleaver, that is as distinct as a Dürer engraving, and registers as a small human splendor, even with its cutting edge.

Black and white images are often the surprises here, especially since the medium seems so far from the stereotype of Warhol’s more spectacular devices. But he is good with these. In a 1986 photograph of Dianne Brill we see only her back, but it shows us everything. An undated view of a tennis court and its habitués is like one of those mediaeval allegories of the vices, here offering a careful reading of indolence.

Jeremy Kost’s “Not Yet Titled (Gaga),” a triptych of photographs made last year, records the new evanescence of the public personality, here masked to make herself more visible. As Warhol did for his subjects, Kost presents Lady Gaga’s self-conscious mutations as experiments in evasion. When will she ever be anonymous again?

In a series of Screen Tests made between 1964 and 1966, not part of the Warhol gift, but included as a wonderfully chosen loan, Warhol records Marcel Duchamp like a unperturbed deer in headlights, some illegible plot of lines inscribed on the wall behind him, with his smile thin-lipped, then pursed. When he turns his head, he becomes a prototype of profile. Paul America’s filmed sequence has the single narrative of his struggle to suppress his laughter. And then there is Lou Reed, sunglassed, Coke bottle in hand, drawing the concoction back to its founding recipe when it actually contained a trace element of cocaine. He is, wonderfully, the Coca Cola corporation’s worst nightmare.

At the time that I walked through this show the space had been put into service as the background for a fashion photo shoot. The model had some vocal exercises obviously meant to shape her face properly for the camera. So my progress was accompanied by a litany of “hi, hi,” “aw, aw,” and “you’re so cute.” There was something strangely appropriate to these empty gestures pretending not to be so as an accompaniment and contrast to what I was seeing in these galleries, particularly after I sat down with headphones to listen to the more arresting chants recorded in Rashaad Newsome’s 2009 work “Shade Compositions (Screen Test 2).” But this was simply further evidence of how sensitive the exhibition was to Warhol’s thoroughgoing curiosity. Even accidents immediately found their proper place in the story.

At one point in an episode from Andy Warhol’s TV of 1981 that was also on view, the film director John Waters affirms that “I like to eavesdrop.” The visual equivalent of that is found in these photographs, with Warhol the voracious, forgiving auditor. Each small museum like this one that received a careful sampling of his work now possesses an equally precise testimony. But not every one of them will let us listen in as clearly as this exhibition does.

The Landscape Remarked: An Anniversary at Storm King

[published September, 2010, Art New England]

5 + 5: New Perspectives Storm KIng Art Center, Mountainville, New York

Pilgrimages do not all have a single destination, nor a single route, but they do require landmarks. This is one useful definition of the Storm King Art Center. In its fifty years of existence, it has taken on some of the qualities of a shrine to large scale sculpture. Yet it has never been trapped into a single vision of permanence, or an isolated sanctuary. A state thruway is near enough to be a reminder of the roaring world, very like the rail line that runs near the site of Thoreau’s Walden cabin.

The exhibition 5 + 5: New Perspectives makes a new map out of the previously installed sculpture on the grounds. Including works by five artists already represented in the collection and five who have not shown here before, all of the pieces are new to Storm King, with a number of them made explicitly for it. But rather than being grouped together, they are scattered throughout the grounds, rewriting what was there before in the process.

There are moments when a sense of darkness emerges, as in Alice Aycock’s Low Building With Dirt Roof (for Mary), a more domestic variation on Richard Serra’s steel blades slicing out of the earth elsewhere on the property. Here is an evocation of a poem by Emily Dickinson where a traveler accompanied by a kindly Death briefly pauses

...before a house that seemedA swelling of the ground;The roof was scarcely visible,The cornice but a mound.

This is a seasonal mausoleum of early New England where the winter dead awaited the thawing. But there is also a hint of jollity in its invitation to mortality’s playground. For a while, one could imagine crawling out as well as in.

Andy Goldsworthy’s earlier work at Storm King loops and meanders like a a wall in Oz, self-contained and precise. The piece he built especially for this exhibition, Five Men, Seventeen Days, Fifteen Boulders, One Wall, has its future already written. When Robert Frost declares ”something there is that doesn’t love a wall,” it is clear that the vanishing of these stone lines is what is meant to be celebrated, not the clichéd effrontery of “good walls” making “good neighbors.” Goldsworthy includes just such a decayed 19th century wall already on the property a part of his new work. Its disappearance in the past readies the new construction for its coming disarray.

Alyson Shotz’s Mirror Fence has a a different way with boundaries, forming them out of transparencies, and offering a model for a border without countries. Her Viewing Scope, when I first saw it, was pointed out at a city street in New Haven where it registered as a prototype for that endless surveillance we assume at every urban intersection. This new pastoral setting suggests the nostalgia of some tourist overlook along the nearby Hudson, but its numerous lenses counter the expectation of a single magnified panorama. It is as if someone had happened upon a visual aide for the many-eyed giant of Greek mythology, assigned to deter a lustful god from a nearby maiden in cow disguise.

In the compact and potent al di la by Mark di Suvero with its suggestion of Leonardo da Vinci’s scythed machines for a Renaissance battlefield, there is also a note of the hay cutting in the meadows below. The same artist’s Old Grey Beam assumes the more familiar scale of his work, with its straddling girders held in a tension that vibrates across the meadow it stands on. The landscape is similar to the one in northern Vermont where the Bread and Puppet Theater once performed its grand pageants. This might have been a skeleton for one of those colossal figures awaiting its entrance.

You & Me by Maria Elena Gonzalez is itself hardly visible, but makes other things appear. Like a scattering of larger tiddlywinks flat to the ground, the piece dots patterns of perspective for pairs of viewers to discover. Imagined from above, these might be entryways to some circuitous underground waterworks extending beneath the property. But their actual function, like a disc jockey sampling music, is to reconfigure the existing artscape, with droll arrangements of visitors’ perspectives into fixed moments of glee that they might not otherwise discover.

It is unfortunate that many people seeing Stephen Talasnik’s, Stream: A Folded Drawing, will immediately think of Big Bambú by Doug and Mike Starn presently on the roof of the Metropolitan Museum of Art. But that amusement park installation has none of Talasnik’s more quietly animated scale, as if it were geometry’s theater clinging to a hillside. And the twisted nails of John Bisbee’s Squall are transformed relics of multiple crucifixions or railroad construction. They wait to roll into motion, playing a variation on Talasnik’s bamboo.

In Darrell Petit’s Kiss, the weight of intimacy registers on the surface of the stone, a paradox of mass and delicacy. Wood is assembled as a carefully managed decay in Ursula von Rydingsvard’s LUBA. This is what it means to rethink a tree in some alternate universe.

In the galleries of the main building there is installed “The View from Here: Storm King at Fifty,” an archival survey of the site’s history with two examples of the challenges of restoration. One of them is the assemblage of truncated monuments that make up Louise Bourgeois’s Number Seventy-Two (The No March) in all its furious sorrow, although my companion that day was impatient for the moment when it would be restored from example to object of its own.

On one wall hangs a plaque displaying the products of the Star Expansion Company whose partners were the source of both the original funding and continuing endowment of the park. These metal plugs and anchors and pins are miniatures of machine made sculpture upon whose small backs rest all the grander forms staked down on the surrounding fields. Everywhere we look in this place, we are reminded that it is possible for human beings to mark the world with grace, even as we vanish from it.

Do you remember Franz Kafka’s drawing machine? It is the executioner's device of the story “In the Penal Colony,”where it punctures the text of the violated law onto a prisoner’s body. In Daniel Heyman’s images of Iraqis abused in the war’s prisons, the testimonies of the tortured serpent across the paper, like tattoos of agony.

One such thread of words in the man’s image entitled I DId Not Have a Beard reads “There is one other thing that happened...but I cannot talk about it.” And we know from his refusal that there is a text of unimaginable pain that is constantly before his eyes. Hamlet’s murdered father makes his ghostly way from hell only to tell his son that he can say nothing of the torments he endures there, since the least of them “would harrow up thy soul.” This is the tortured’s quandary: how to narrate a story which is unbearable to both teller and audience, yet if it is not heard, future horrors are given license to multiply in the silence.

These are not the photographed screams with which bureaucrats catalogued the doomed in Cambodia’s extermination camps. Looking at those, we hear our own anguish, not theirs. Heyman’s renderings are portraits of both person and speech, like transcendent cartoons where the dialogue cannot be contained in the conventional balloons of conversation, but spills out, amok, with the color of the words shifting and vibrating like the tone of voice speaking them.

There is an unexpected paradox in the silk bound covers fashioned for the accordion albums of these faces, with such delicate splendor as a container for pain’s history. And I thought of the philosopher Walter Benjamin’s conviction that “There is no document of civilization that is not at the same time a document of barbarism,” although here the contradiction is deliberate and critical.

A different model is applied in a series of a series of prints entitled “Redacted Portfolio” that is a joint project by Heyman and the poet Nick Flynn. Here the images evoke Ben Shahn’s furious clarity, with the text punctuated by omissions, censorship with a difference, meant to horrify with its absences. But their very incompleteness and flattened dimensions suggest a function as poignant footnotes to the full portraits, rather than as a story of their own.

In a smaller group of pictures, African-American men from Philadelphia are threaded to the Iraq portraits by the common experience of prison. Fewer details emerge in these narratives about the damage done to them there, yet enough is offered to connect the acceptance of the immense penal colony in our own country with the indifference to the torture chambers of Abu Ghraib. What was the training ground for them, if not the isolation chambers of penitentiaries here at home, those domestic illusions that we have found security?

In a recessed alcove at one end of the gallery, like the display of some newly excavated Babylonian city gate, is a plywood construction patterned with ink engravings. Here is a visual glossary of relics from the long violence in Iraq, inheriting the outraged profanity of Philip Guston and Robert Crumb. It is as if an iconostasis meant to veil the altar of an Orthodox church had been desecrated for the sake of the truth, with no doors into a sanctuary where forgiveness might wait.

The same morning I walked through Heyman’s show, I learned that a friend, a painter, was dying. He, too, had been marked by our time’s wars, and then had put those marks down on canvas. Those works have never been publicly shown. How many other artists, here and in Iraq, have taken these brutalities on without finding the conscientious venue that Heyman has? His work is for them, too, in their struggle to be heard above the clank and clatter of this rapacious thing we call our culture.

So I carried a private grief to one last face on the exhibition’s walls. “I was released with no money very far from my house,” read the words of a man for whom the term survivor would have no meaning, even though he goes on living. He will always be very far from that place he called home, except for the trace of it that Heyman has made for him in this bright memorial of his loss.

Our visions of a ravaged future usually require an urban setting, with cannibal survivors of the apocalypse lodging in the rubble. But here we have a pastoral dystopia, its inhabitants out foraging, or cowering in some hidden shelter meant for escaping the notice of suspect strangers.

Or is it, instead, the ravaged past? This is also something in this of an abandoned Native American village waiting to be burned, evocative of the nearby 17th century massacres of Pequots by European colonists.

These communal images are consonant with Dougherty’s model of construction. In this case, while the design is his alone, a small collective was gathered to realize the piece, with no particular expertise expected, only their enthusiasm. The individual artist’s claim is in part relinquished, in the same way as was Christo and Jeanne-Claude's to “The Gates” in Central Park.

When I first saw this work shortly after its installation last July, I imagined it turning darker, more ominous. The winter has now had its way with it, and I’ve gotten what I wished for. Admittedly, it was overcast on the day that I revisited it, but I do not think that the full sun at noon would have brightened the piece in any measurable way.

No longer ideal for a family outing, this is now some malevolent playground where children might vanish, as if the place were a lure constructed by Hansel and Gretel’s witch. But its power is now clearer, and no longer so whimsical as that impression that I carried away from my original encounter, and then wrote about elsewhere with bemused pleasure

Reimagined as the ruins of some looted monastery with a Romanesque cellar, or catacombs that have lurched above ground, with what could well be corpses wrapped by parasite twigs from some alien’s campground, it is unsettling and wonderful.

The materials are obviously resisting their orderly setting, held in a tension that is only waiting to unloose itself, and reanimate this landscape previously established as a memorial to the ghosts of domestic Impressionists who once resided here in their evanescent world. Where the “Rambles” succeeds is in proving that some decay can be both lively and haunted.

The Walls of Eden

[March, 2010, Artist's website]

We see heaven more clearly, being kept from it. This is the lesson of Cat Balco’s “Net.” And while there is reason to accept her title, there is nothing here of Agamemnon snared for slaughter, or bird collectors with their thin webs stretched between poles. This is more a transparent fence, like the hurdles of woven willow that divided wilderness from planting on ancient British farms.

What if this was what Eve looked back at as she walked into our world, with the cherubim, tiny and potent, whirling on tracks around the borders of her lost garden? The bright boundary of the foreground throws the threads of landscape behind it into high relief. Interstices of shadowed blue and green, all that is visible of Eden’s rivers, shape the surface into an illusory panorama, as if vanishing points were forbidden.

There are colors here that belong to Andrea Mantegna’s 15th century wedding room in Mantua, where the ceiling of sky becomes a theatre balcony for children of paradise to peer down from. Balco has created dimensionality here with a palette that is also reminiscent of how Maxwell Parrish’s apparently fictional intensity of color is simply the realism of a common moment in a late summer evening. An invented spectrum can be the world being made to look as it is when closest to its creation, weaving it from colors alone.

Having known Balco’s earlier smaller scale works, an example of which is shown alongside this one, it is clear that they were fragments in advance of the whole that she has only been waiting to unpack. Instead of decaying into something like the puzzle pieces of a Pompeiian fresco, this painting emerges from its parts.

But it will be erased all it once. For now, it is installed where panels of sunlight envy its design. The windows open out on scenery of longing: stone piles, stripped foundations, a frozen waterfront, all sufficient reminders of how much we need painting like this. Perhaps this is not the last of it. Like the movable wooden enclosures it evokes, it could be recreated in any other place, tracing heaven’s endless walls.

What We Learned: The Yale Las Vegas Studio and the Work of Venturi Scott Brown & Associates Yale School of Architecture Gallery, New Haven, CT

There will be no ruins of Las Vegas. Everything of its previous history is absolutely erased by design. Nothing will be left to uncover as David Macaulay did in his post-apocalyptic comic, Motel of the Mysteries, which imagined a Howard Carter-like excavation of a roadside motor lodge.

What seemed absolutely contemporary in 1968, when Robert Venturi and Denise Scott Brown wandered the Strip (since renamed Las Vegas Boulevard) with an assortment of Yale architecture students, has vanished, like the Stardust Hotel into its imploding cloud. So there is a reluctant dismay - more like a nostalgia begrudged - that accompanies this Yale exhibition, a composite of two separate retrospectives of work by the architects.

There are many small surprises here: the cut paper assemblages presented as architectural drafts in dimensionality, the incorporation of manga technique into the design of a Japanese hotel, a proposed boulevard of giant Disney characters for the French Disneyland that would have been an unimpeachable rendering of imperialism. And there are a variety of mediations on the charged relationship between drawing and execution, where the former seems to have satisfied them even more than the latter.

There are also indisputable successes among works of theirs that have been realized, such as the Allen Art Museum in Oberlin, Ohio, in its bright, comic balance with the “Giant Three Way Plug” by Claes Oldenburg, an artist for whom they have an obvious and particular kinship.

The walls filled with the visual diary of what they happened on in Nevada over forty years ago reminds us that the raucous energy of that landscape has evolved today into only an inflated parody of itself. These images include something like the haunting documentary of the ordinary that Edward Hopper found in his streets. As he was, they are journalists of memory. But what is on display in these galleries is less important than a reflection on the ideas which inspired the work, especially those which emerged out of the book Learning from Las Vegas. Reading through it again, what’s striking about it is the “modesty” that Scott Brown describes as one of the deep purposes of their exercise. She and Venturi were committed, above all else, to move away from the arrogance of an imposed architecture.

For them, Las Vegas was what the vernacular created when it thought itself imaginative, an untrained fantasy. “Decoration is cheaper,” as they put it, but it also serves to diminish space as a central architectural notion. Las Vegas domesticates the desert, adding brightness to the emptiness. That contrast of the billboard in the desert is not merely ironic. The sign painter alone against the horizon in the Terence Malick film “Badlands,” is only able to see the world when it becomes a depiction. This is what Venturi means by the symbolic value of making architecture. It has no value if it does not tell us where we are. And we always know that in Las Vegas.

But there is more, and it suggests that while human desires are central to what Venturi and Scott Brown found compelling about Las Vegas, the moral isolation which accompanied them rarely appears. They never ask what it means to walk through a parking lot that has no instructions for pedestrians. And the displays they make the most of are often erased by daylight. “If you take away the signs, there is no place.” This comes very close to Gertrude Stein’s “there’s no there there. “ But Stein was looking for where she had lived in Oakland as a child. No one looks for the past in Las Vegas. Or for home.

William Lamson @ Artspace

[published December, 2009, Big, Red and Shiny]

William Lamson, Time is Like the East River, 2009, installationArtspace, New Haven, CT

Comedy refuses mortality. That is Buster Keaton’s lesson, and why, I think, he is a greater artist than Charlie Chaplin. There is something too elaborately contrived about all of Chaplin’s encounters with disaster; he simpers too much to ever make the threats he faces seem credible. Although Keaton is never surprised by the possibilities of violence which the world offers, he knows that they are real. Doomed, but unmoved, his persistence is never smug or self-conscious. Always on the edge of extinction, Keaton knows that comic timing is merely a temporary salvation which may well fail on the next go around. But the sounds of laughing are what keep the absurdity at bay. Samuel Beckett tried to honor that in the work “Film,” which he wrote for Keaton, but all he could do was remind you of what Keaton had already done on his own.This may seem a curious way into William Lamson’s most recent work, but I could not help thinking of the silent film artist when I encountered Lamson’s new project. This was true as well of my response to several earlier pieces Lamson produced, especially the short animation “Yard,” or the bloodlessly violent video “Duel.” They share a sense of hilarity as a form of consolation, even if a fragile one. Laughter in the midst of darkness is at its most powerful. In the central video of the work, the pair of what appear to be two separate small boats are rowed together and reassembled as a single canoe. Then, as the camera’s field widens, the small frame of water becomes the East River and the Brooklyn Bridge, and then the mass of the city. Indomitable, the small craft persists. In Keaton’s film, “The Balloonatics,” another comic canoe, similarly sectioned, becomes an unexpected vehicle for escape from time running out in a large universe.

In the opposite gallery, a grid of arrows just below the ceiling measures the dimensions of space, with the video tape segments stretched between them serving as time frames without conventional sequence. Their beginning and end look absolutely the same; one can consider them from either direction. Does this realize Zeno’s paradox: the arrow that is both still and in motion at the same moment? On the floor beneath them is a paused video screen in permanent blue. It is a reminder that the recorder is a small time machine, its wind and rewind controls at play with chronology. There is the joy of reversing the world, or, as in Kurt Vonnegut’s image of a World War II bombing run played backwards, the restoration of it. There is also a further variation on the notion of “automatic” drawing, here produced by burning fuses and small firecrackers. This time period had two beginnings, and one end, where the ignited strands extinguished themselves. As with the “canoe drawing” in another gallery where the artist creates a motion machine, time writes its own history. As for clocks, they appear with a difference. One measures the particular occasion of a slack tide, that moment of balance near both high and ebb. The back and forth before and after that moment is registered by hands that move in reverse as well as forward. In a separate piece entitled “Drip (So Are the Days of Our Lives),” the hourglass form is inverted, with its sand eroded by slowly dripping water rather than falling free, the finite principle in a shower stall.

There is anguish here, too. The bows used to fashion the patterns of arrows stand at one end of a long gallery, mirroring one another, like the weapon of Philoctetes, the Greek warrior abandoned with an incurable wound on the way to Troy. This measure of time would be pain. And in the timeline that is like a pattern of miniature explosions on the surface of a wall, what might be a work total destruction appears small at a distance. And the arrows are also a drawing, like the remains of some medieval Japanese siege imagined by Kurosawa, with the wooden fortress walls measured out by the shafts thick on them.

But this is where comedy counts for the most, standing over and against a reality often too difficult to bear. There is no place you can go at the moment to learn more about the nature of time than in this work of William Lamson’s. And no place where we are offered the gift of such a brilliant joke about our passing away. In one photograph, stretched between the two pieces of his bifurcated canoe, Lamson is poised above a minor void. But we know that he will be saved, and that we can laugh at that.

There are artists who protest too much. And they often find an audience, half-grateful, willing to defer to the presumed authority of their declarations on meaning. This simplifies matters. Or so Philip Pearlstein would have one think. His canvases, heaped with images, are offered as meaningless. One might dismiss this as merely disingenuous, and leave it at that. But while the artist may disown his metaphors, the world cannot so easily be stripped of them. Pearlstein’s consistent pairing of objects and naked human bodies is not merely a series inventive, but empty, free associations.

Representation has its price. One does not escape allegory either by edict or by wishing. Myths will have their way, even if – like the neglected witch of Sleeping Beauty – they are not invited. A nude woman in the company of a swan is always Leda, though in one of Pearlstein’s renderings, the fable is made wooden with what might be a shooting gallery target. In another version, now accompanied by a statue of the god Mercury and an accordion, the bestiality becomes comic. In several variants of another ancient story, the sirens are made gigantic by miniature boats.

The thin line between rape and gynecology is drawn in one watercolor study where a butterfly hangs over a nude woman in an examination chair. Such a piece of furniture cannot be an accident of interior decoration; it demands to be recognized for what it is if the incongruity, and the threat, are to take shape. A dirigible, a kiddie car airplane and two models become a heap of limbs and wreckage; the aftermath of a disaster, with corpses as large as the broken machines.

Superman, Nefertiti, a gargoyle and a horse that could be a plaything from Troy are the debris of Western culture, gazed upon by their naked companion like Rembrandt’s Aristotle wondering over Homer. The difference is a world like Macbeth’s where “all is but toys,” and what mattered once, no longer does. This records an emptiness with value, and is not simply an abstraction by artist’s edict. Every choice here is charged with loss.

Mickey Mouse and a White House for birds read like a gathering of all our country’s demons, repeated in a canvas where the Walt Disney character performs for an uninterested couple, the painter now as puppeteer, insisting that the models are nothing more than toys themselves, forcing us up against the paradox of knowing that they are not.

The wind blows through these works, with their whirligigs and Chinese kites and sailing ships, the air made visible in inflated chairs and balls. But there is also the weight of metal against flesh, an iron butcher sign with its cleaver and saw and a spear-pointed weathervane that dares us into indifference. This is realism of the magical kind, where the bizarre is always hung about with violence.

This brings us to the sense in which Pearlstein is correct in his disdain for content. It has nothing to do with abstraction, but with the brutality of our looking. An early print of his which I once knew well, had the radical amputations of limbs and head that I thought allowed for a clearer grandeur of form, free of personality. But this recent encounter with his work reminds me that he is more a documentarian of perception. He is simply recording our encounters with each other in the streets, drained of the human, like a frog left an empty bag by something voracious. Weary pornographers that we are, we have all seen too much to care.

Moral Objects: the Good, the Bad, and the Painting

[published July, 2009, New Haven Advocate]

Paintings from the Reign of Victoria: The Royal Holloway Collection, LondonYale Center for British Art (1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, 203-432-2800, www.yale.edu/ycba) through July 26

Why believe that painting can teach us anything moral? If, for example, Picasso’s Guernica was meant to bring a stop to the indiscriminate bombing of civilian communities from the air, we have only to note the most recent news from Afghanistan as evidence of its continuing failure.

But Thomas Holloway had a precise confidence in the ethical potential of art, particularly as a device for the education of middle class British women during the late 19th century. An entrepreneur of patent medicines bent upon creating some practical monument, he acquired – in an extended fell swoop of only three years – a collection of paintings as a museum of morality for what he had founded as the first women’s college in Britain.

Reading through what is most of this single-minded project now on view at Yale is to catalogue the illusions at work in Western culture before the coming of industrialized war. In Edwin Landseer’s “Man proposes, God disposes,” the threats to progress are to be found only in the ravening of the natural world. While there are traces of a dismal undercurrent to society in Luke Fildes’ painting “Applicants for Admission to a Casual Ward” where an assortment of the homeless line up for a night’s shelter, the scene is no more self-conscious over injustice than Briton Riviere’s “Sympathy” with its depiction of a child in comfortable exile, encouraged by her pet dog, or the same artist’s panic of geese at the sight of a magician’s (or assassin’s) hat.

Where the marginal appear in the worlds painted here, they are almost always in crowds of beggars or gypsies or prisoners, never as individuals. In Frank Holl’s “Newgate: Committed for Trial,” the wedding rings on the hands of distraught wives and the gold buttons of the guards are the gilding of that conventional morality that G.B. Shaw’s Liza Doolittle would deflate not quite forty years later. In William Powell Frith’s “The Railway Station,” the miniature portraits of Elizabethan nobility are now grandly assembled in an encyclopedia of the middle class. In the distance, seen through cast iron arches, a facade from Piero della Francesca’s fantasy of a Renaissance city is blurred by modern steam.

What the female students are entitled to know of the political world is that it is either covert, as in John Pettie’s “A State Secret,” (imagine Donald Rumsfeld in cardinal’s garb) with wax seals spotted like blood across what could be any table where distant slaughters are commanded; or athletic, as in the worker prince depicted by Daniel Maclise in “Peter the Great at Deptford Dockyard.” Here is the preface to the angular spotlit realism of Stanley Spencer, whose painting “The Builders” in Yale’s permanent collection shows the same pasty workers’ complexions like those pale fish too long in their underground ponds.

There is not much else here to warn us of the future, save for a John Linnell landscape that turns the earth to liquid, and Alfred Elmore’s “Emperor Charles V at the Convent at Yuste” depicting power stunned into reality, like Prospero at the end of The Tempest,

“...where very third thought shall be my grave.”

Here is what art can paint for us: memory, and what is to come of mortality.

The new show at the Parachute Factory Gallery narrows the moral question to the world of work, or its vanishing. It makes clear that any current evocation of traditional industry is largely a record of absence.

Frank Bruckmann’s depictions of small businesses and crafts register as anomalies. We are surprised at their existence, but not convinced. Though they appear viable at the moment, there is no escaping a preemptive nostalgia.

Cindy Tower’s documents of abandonment reveal a carnival infrastructure. Her factory rooms painted to scale on plastic tarps are all bravura defiance; she throws the paint on knowing it’s going to flake and crack but says to hell with it. This is how best to honor machines and the people who served them: with works as fragile as their subjects.

Among the photographs included here, there are several invitations to comparison with earlier renderings of similar subjects. Hank Paper’s butcher looks back to the Weimar Republic baker photographed by August Sander. Paper’s catalog of trades often shows workers framed by their windows, reminders of how we usually see physical labor at some remove from what is our daily experience.

What was the heroic machinery of Margaret Bourke-White’s photographs for Life magazine has in David Ottenstein’s images become pathetic, with turbines draped in cloth like the furniture of some empty summer house or plaster saints hooded in grief on a Lenten altar. In one image, with floor pools mirroring the decay, the only way to make the machines run once again would be to muddle the stained water. And Ottenstein provides what is the clearest moral of the exhibition in his study of abandoned industrial scales that stand there, weighing nothing.

Wall to Wall: An Introductory Meditation on Sol LeWitt

[published February, 2009, Big, Red and Shiny]

“Sol LeWitt: A Wall Drawing Retrospective” MASS MoCA, North Adams, MA

Into the maze, then...the shifting from walled in to walled up to walled out, moving through the bands of color as if they were tinted sound. This is the compendium of one hundred and five drawings by Sol LeWitt now on view at MASS MoCa in an exhibit that alters the notion of “temporary” to a scale of twenty-five years.

It deserves the time. And any intent viewer will require it. These are materials for meditation, as once were the melted frescoes of the Campo Santo at Pisa. And as those also were, these are memento mori, legacy and obituary of the dead artist who planned his funerary monument in advance.

Best, then, to offer a mortal commentary in fragments, perhaps for as many years as are granted before one world or another ends?

The sheer number of pieces by LeWitt shown here makes an almost absolute claim on the history of this reconfigured industrial space, although the labor intensive quality of the project necessarily links them to the working past of the building and the memory of older fabrications within it. It discovers itself as site specific for this long moment – there will never be another such grand configuration.

And it forces the drawings into conversation. What “Wall Drawing 614” reveals here is not its identity where it is rendered in the entry space of the Yale University Art Galley in New Haven, even allowing for the necessary variants that accompany its instructions of “Rectangles formed by 3-inch (8 cm) wide India ink bands, meeting at right angles.” It is always that; yet always something different.

But the solitude and separation of LeWitt’s work in other venues, as when his “Wall Drawing 725” mirrored and mumbled over Richard Serra’s double slabbed “Stacks (again at Yale – now both removed) are lost here. The jumble(whatever its chronologies) produces a sample book writ large. Each image feels as if it were awaiting adoption.

The gift here is that every one of the works has an imagined existence as well as an actual one – looking is composing according to instruction, while not feeling constrained – this is LeWitt’s particular power as a teacher.

There are associations here, of course; among them “Wall Drawing 146A” which disassembles late Matisse blue and white cutouts along invisible grids and “Wall Drawing 527” with its evocation of an abandoned radar pyramid on a North Dakota field. These are patterns of memory as well as abstraction – the world is not that far away.

Except, perhaps, when standing in the fluorescent brilliance between drawings 413 and 414 – here is an interrogation room for paradise where you could tell nothing but the truth, by only being asked a question.

All this is fragile, but endlessly repeatable, in spite of the “deluge system” which waits behind the sprinkler heads to wipe the walls clean.

Seen and Unseen: A Meditation on Art in Secret

[published January, 2009, New Haven Advocate]

Any object is marred by seeing. The veil in the Temple at Jerusalem was meant to keep the holy intact. On a cruder lever, there are those exposés in travel sections of untrammeled beaches which of course guarantee their disappearance under mounds of trash. To reveal them means to erase them. Whatever people find there will not be what it was that inspired their coming.

How do I write, then, about something which I would rather that no one else experience? This is neither smug nor selfish. But there are hidden places which by accident or grace we come upon and realize that there should be no further intrusion – that what is valuable about them will be destroyed by company.

This past summer, I was led by a friend to a building in New Haven that I had passed with out notice often enough. Inside, was a universe absolutely personal in arrangement – webs and unshaded light bulbs from forgotten interrogations, frescoed caves, the Bastille liberated, shovels and mops and electrical cords that balanced between object and use, texts with fragmented speeches and instructions, invented idols and supplicants, creeds and mirrors, oracles and cartoons, a fallout shelter for poetry and weaving.

There is a circle that knows this work, sits inside of it – friends, initiates, companions of the maker – they see it as a sanctuary in the making, When I returned to the place, alone, bringing a camera, the artist was clear: “I won’t talk about it.” This was his guarantee of the work, and not a surprise. There would be no interview, no academic deconstruction, no documentation for a doctoral thesis

He knew I was a journalist. My camera had become a tourist’s trick to gather some slim evidence to convince future skeptics of what I had witnessed. I moved in a rush, fearful that permission could be withdrawn at any moment, being careful not to record the faces of anyone alive in the room. But even as I made for the door it was already clear to me that I could never lead anyone back to this place or offer its address to some merchant avid for outsider art. There was no command to keep silent but my own. It made me wish that Howard Carter, standing inside Tutankhamen’s tomb, had decided to keep his mouth shut and simply shoveled the sand back over the entrance.

Of course, there are others who know where this marvel is – and the person who originally invited me there may decide to identify it to others, or perhaps already has. And there are the photographs accompanying this article – images out of context like glances through a peephole. That much has been given away. And the door into this amazement is not always locked.

Let it be clear that I am making no claim to discovery here. This is not a private triumph, at least not in any unique way. We all have all happened upon such things. A friend who wanders locally mentioned a walk through some nearby woods that led onto a clearing filled with an ensemble of stone constellations and puzzles of piled branches. In his most recent book of travels – Roads to Quoz – William Least Heat-Moon describes his entry into an Arkansas living room with something very like the Watts Towers built inside of it. It’s important only that we know that these things exist. We do not have to actually witness them in order for their wonder to register. This is the singing of the liturgical hours being done in some monastery as you read this – it remakes the world even when unheard, invisible. It is like the ladder into the kiva of a Hopi pueblo. There is an opening through which we cannot enter, but whatever happens inside somehow contributes to our preservation. We need the reassurance that there are, after all, hidden fragments of splendor to being human, surrounded by massacres as we are.

An epilogue [June, 2009]

Several weeks ago I published a piece here about an art work which I was committed to keeping secret. There is no longer any point to the confidence. The wreckers have come and done what they do, scouring the space to its frame. I made inquiries, given what scraps of information I had, but the family of the maker has not responded to requests for explanation. There were only hints of some tragedy other than the loss of the private world that was fashioned there.

So what I wrote was, without my realizing it at the time, a memorial to Mario and what he made inside the Artistic Beauty Salon on Chapel Street between Orange and State. Some banality of a dollar store will find its way into the space, and there will be no sign of the small wonder that was there, now vanished like a miniature of the Crystal Palace.

A friend saw the demolition underway from a bus window and telephoned me. By the time I arrived, all that I could save was a drawing of a woman in magic marker on red paper with the only legible word being “source.” When I asked one of the men pouring plaster fragments into the dumpster what had happened he responded to my question in a language I did not understand.

Perhaps that is all the answer I needed.

A Boat for Paradise: the Paintings of Nathan Lewis

[published September, 2008, Big, Red and Shiny]

“Where Heaven Made Fun: A Survey of Works by Nathan Lewis,” Seton Art Gallery, University of New Haven, West Haven, CT.

What if there were painting that mattered? There is an unequivocal answer to this question in the survey of work by Nathan Lewis now on exhibit in West Haven, Connecticut.

Nothing is to be found here of those artists whose technique is their only subject. Lewis’s skill with paint – painstaking and inventive – is literally invisible; at the center of his art is an imagination that defies inevitability. His is the free world: honest about its terrors, but not reducible to them.

There is a narrative here – without sequence, but presented as the intersections of story, where threads of art and politics overlap. The lost records being restored in these images are not offered as exercises in either nostalgia or conceit. Rather, they are instructions in how the individual can take charge of history in ways that the official archives would rather forbid.

Lewis’s chosen iconography is personal without being mysterious; even in those cases where recognition might prove unlikely, those cases are no more rare than the daily confusions the world ordinarily offers. No cypher book or glossary is necessary; there is an implicit trust that all witnesses to the work already carry a catalogue of shared culture – both popular and exotic – from which we can select workable instruments for reading the revisioning that Lewis is working at, and to which we are invited to contribute.

The centerpiece image of “Until We Find the Blessed Isles Where Our Friends Are Dwelling” for all its obvious allusions, cannot be reduced to a single quotation. While George Washington is clearly afloat here on a thawed Delaware, the “The Raft of the Medusa” is also present, with Delacroix’s mortuary faces arisen live to the sunlit pink of a museum mural’s fantastic geology. This is a flash flood that will carry craft and passengers outside the frame, leaving a landscape of dry bones behind. Unlike the mad cook of Apocalypse Now who vows to “never get out of the boat,” this crew of survivors is meant for the promised land.

In “The Blessed Isles, “ there is a camera shutter about to click shut on the universe, or a spinning carnival wheel of fortune with heaven at the center wherever it clicks to a stop. Punctuated with botanicals and electronics and Fred Astaire drummers, this is the vortex of definitive public myths – those happy lies which keep us sane.

“Under My Thumb (History of the World, Part 1)” is a sports event for the apocalypse, played in sight of the rubble. This is not the warrior football of M.A.S.H. The frenzy of this overpopulated playing field is only apparent, with each player completely independent and unrelated – a mob of solitary athletes, using derricks as goal posts for the only – and last – game in town.

“Second Life” takes place beneath the dangling legs of a barefoot paratrooper or a levitating yogi, where the last, tardy pilgrims on the road to Canterbury consult their outdated maps. As in several of these paintings, birch trees are omniscient, echoing Robert Frost, who would

“...climb black branches up a snow-white trunkToward heaven, till the tree could bear no more...”

The stripped fields in the background might have once held a scarecrow from Oz with his arms whirling to indicate all possible routes.

“Strange Fruit” has a special kind of completeness – a summary work with Lewis’s characteristic reversals of time and place. Here Mussolini and his mistress are sinking upright underwater rather than hung head down from a metal canopy as they were by their killers, their corpses speaking Beckett in the company of balloons or buoys shining like candy. Derricks – the scaffolds of contemporary executions – are accompanied by guitar, and irises tilt across a frame in which there is no central axis or still point of view that is either necessary or final.

Like a casting director for folk tales, Lewis frames and reframes his recurring characters. Here are Charlie Chaplin rifles with popgun smoke, a cross culture of servants, demon rams, and the pointed fingers of creation or accusation or the funhouse exit or the hand of a detective squatting at a crime scene. Texts are integral even when unreadable, with the edges of the stretchers made into frames of wordsIn “Mocking Bird“ – with its trees growing out of the ruins of the Hudson River School – the title rings inside a painted question: “Can you triumph over this thought” that there is nothing left to do that has not already been done? Lewis succeeds in winning that contest, showing us that we do not yet know – in this warring world – all that we desperately need to.

All the Lost Pictures: Jerome Liebling Teaches Looking[published June, 2008, New Haven Advocate]

There is a road. And a shadow (draining the weight from the wooden farm building that throws it) which severs the pavement, then spreads like ink across the blotting paper of the foliage – a proscenium arch of darkness. We all have memories that resemble this photograph entitled “Barn, Foliage, Hadley, Massachusetts.” They have neither tragedy nor ecstasy to recommend them. There is no explanation of how something so much of the pure ordinary as this is – an unremarkable roadside – should carry such necessary glory that we remember it almost against our will. And yet we have the record absolutely clear and within easy recall. There is some secret here that we will never know, but cannot abandon.The exhibition “Everyday Monuments: the Photographs of Jerome Liebling” now at the Yale University Art Gallery (1111 Chapel Street, New Haven, 203-432-0600, artgallery.yale.edu) until September 7 is full of such modest splendors, illustrated lessons in what we miss seeing, but still record.Liebling is one of the few photographers who demand that we look at the world differently, rather than look at a different world in photographs. Compare his “Boston, Massachusetts (1984) with Paul Strand’s “Wall Street” (1915) which is included as part of another exhibition on the next wall of the gallery. Strand’s image – taken at a distance – is a grand opera of ennui. Liebling comes in close, tracing the same dying patterns of the sun, but finding what is human in all the souls transfixed by that light.A surface of nipples and bristles and flies tells us everything of a hog without showing us one. All the chill of winter roofs is in the laundry frozen dry on lines invisible from the street. Some agrarian fascist fashioned the grain elevators that are rendered like a de Chirico canvas in black and white. Images from the South Bronx in 1977 are a perfection of ruins, one massive windowless wall with the graffittied name “Orlando,” as if this was the city practice for the Shakespearean lover before he began hammering poems into the trees of Arden.A debris of manikins in one photograph is reconfigured in the prosaic bulk of the torsos Liebling registers among the women of Brighton Beach, flowered in cloth, fruited by sidewalk grocers. And the compassion of the photographer’s gaze matched by the subject’s makes the question automatic – what became of the child in the 1949 photograph “Boy and Car, New York City”?I was one year old when that picture was taken. What has become of me? The student curators have largely chosen well from among the Liebling photographs now in the University’s collection, a number that was significantly augmented by a recent acquisition of nearly forty images. These include several studies of the the interiors of American authors’ homes – particularly those lived in by Melville, Dickinson and Twain. Here are predictable fragments of sentiment – a personable indulgence meant to be captioned with quotes.But all the best work here needs no commentary. Is the figure in “Morning, Monessen, Pennsylvania” a last survivor or a visiting ghost? Whatever the answer, the woman standing in the light leaves you to wonder – not only what brought Liebling there to that moment – but also how many other like moments have vanished without anyone to record them as he has this one. It stands as a memorial for all that has been lost. And as an instruction regarding what we should watch for – and remember.

Saving Words: A Retrospective of the Work of Corita Kent

[published May, 2008, Big, Red and Shiny]

“We Can Create Life Without War: A Retrospective Exhibit of the Works of Corita Kent,”Breslin Fine Arts Gallery, East Greenwich, RI

These were the flash cards for resistance. Corita Kent began as an artist in a Roman Catholic religious order, until her outrageous reverence (“Mary Mother is the juiciest tomato of them all”) proved too much for the prelates of nostalgia. She then, in 1968, made her way to Boston to create the serigraphs that now function as an illustrated history of what followed, a memory album of conviction.

But a melancholy has taken hold of them, like the rust stains from the tacks that once held the corners of these images – like lesser crucifixes – to the walls of the faithful. She began with the making of alphabets, collecting the instruments that she would deploy in the service of her outrage and hope. That “mmmarvelous Sunkist taste!” is an early exercise in the typography of immediacy; the only violence she is capable of is that which demands that attention be paid, as in the graphic compulsion of “Road Signs,” made in 1969.

Hers is a pilgrimage for words in the face of what is unspeakable, as in the piecemeal fashioning of a clipped op-ed essay by Arthur Miller on Robert Kennedy’s murder, or the frequent allusions to Walt Whitman’s poetry from the hospitals of the Civil War: his discovery that “Agonies are one of my changes of garments” is as close to a motto as she will discover.

Many of the pieces here are vehicles for her to announce the witness of those whom she loved. In one, the Berrigan brothers, Daniel and Philip, are standing over the burning draft records at Catonsville, Maryland, purified by the colors of fire like the impervious children in Nebuchadnezzar’s furnace.

In the 1969 print “Manflowers, ” the tinted photograph of a wounded soldier with its inscription “where have all the flowers gone” prefigures the photomontage of 1970 by the Art Workers’ Coalition where a color image of the slaughtered at My Lai has printed over it the phrase “And babies” rendered as both question and answer in a magnified red font.

Art stood up then, and for her part,Corita Kent cut the world into colors and reassembled it as it should have been.

But now, the record of the Berrigans and the death warrants they turned to ash is forty years old. There is another war, and Philip is dead. Many of these prints with their cursive catalogues listing the names of moral rebels now read like a prism of grave markers; so many gone, and so much struggle remaining.

She must have seen some of this coming. No darkness was ever rendered so brightly as in the image entitled “So far the crocuses have always come up,” completed shortly before her death in 1986.

But there is one image closer to a last word, even without a date. Laid almost as an after thought in a flat display cabinet of scattered papers, a small water color wash brightens the air. It carries one clear trace of the future in the midst of all this past.

There was a box near his kiln full of all the pots he had shattered, like a collection of shards for Job to scratch his festering skin with. I was neither outraged nor saddened by this, but puzzled. What did he see that I did not?

It was that question that returned to me when I learned only a few weeks ago of Brother Thomas Bezanson’s death last August. It had been over forty years since I first stepped into his pottery, then at the Benedictine Priory in Weston, Vermont.

With that news came the sense of obligation for a eulogy, but one that refused competition with his own words. Thomas wrote even in disobedience of his private conviction that the work should be left to its unaccompanied voice. And he wrote well, free of the babble which most artists find themselves driven to when up against the mysteries of their own making.

But what way did I have to account for my own history with his work, and its paradox of glazed surfaces which denied the physics that should have limited them? And what difference should it make in the wartime of the present that such things as he fashioned exist at all?

If Brother Thomas had a sense of original sin, it was that perfection is out of our finite reach. Flaws were not necessary – they were unavoidable. Still, there was something in him that required that the imperfection be perfect, that it could be read in the morality of the piece.

For his works were not escapist, but defiant. They were hope’s evidence in a world whose weight was angry against them. These mortal ceramics, breakable, were still somehow artifacts of Eden – a reminder of what once was, and yet could be again.

There is a temptation to reference scripture when desperate for some adequate evocation of what Thomas made, but the cliché of “treasures in earthen vessels” is neither self evident nor responsible as a judgment.

The clay in Jesus’ hands that heals blindness comes closer. Thomas’s eyes were open, especially to who he was as artist and believer. Humility is not self-abnegation but certainty as to where the self begins and ends. And to be in the presence of one of his pots is to see with a clarity that approaches pain, that very experience of one blind from birth who suddenly has sight.And then there is that potter’s field bought as a cemetery for strangers with the coins that Judas threw away, a place where the artists dug their clay. All our graves are anonymous in the end; even when carved names survive, there is no one to recognize them. But, shaped dust that we are, pottery is an exercise in creating our own image, a shadow of God.

All Thomas’ pieces were memorials, evoking those masters of China and Japan who had sent the measure of clay out of the past. He took those lessons seriously, but he had no belief in apprentices. The learning was meant to be a lonely journey

There was a time when I decided that my possessions had become unbearable, too much of what mattered to me in them. My thought was that by reducing their number, I would free myself. But what resulted was merely a compounding of value – the fewer things held all the burden of the many. One of the last was a piece by Brother Thomas that had come into my possession as an inheritance. I became afraid around it. It was to me merely precious, my anticipation of its breaking the only relationship I had with it. So I gave it away, an occasion of sin become grace, as I thought. But I had not learned the lesson of fragility that all Thomas’s work taught – that only the lost were saved.

It is incredible to me still that these things he made were once simply clay.

And that he was.

Into the Woods: Works by Ori Gersht [published December, 2007, Big, Red and Shiny]

Yale Center for British Art

These woods are dark and deep; but they are not lovely. This is Ori Gersht’s video panorama, “The Forest,” made in 2005. A stand of trees, indistinct voices, one crack of sound. A hunter, or an execution?

How much of the history of its inspiration do we require to make sense of this piece? Over sixty years ago, Gersht’s father-in -law hid, desperate, in these Ukrainian woods. For many other Jews, they were a killing ground. The specifics of those horrors are nowhere noted in the work itself. But the terror is still palpable.

The threat of this place is not simply in its past, and the darkness it contains can be found in other unexpected places – Kitty Genovese dying on a street in Queens while the neighbors wait. But Gersht’s revised pastoral relies on those murderous fairy tales of children wandering towards their doom in an indifferent nature. And there was a child in the auditorium for the showing of the video at the same time as I was, watching. He had questions for his father that he spoke aloud. What he was seeing made him uncertain, but fascinated. All that he did not know protected him, while my memory of what the world has done filled the screen with imminent violence.

That cliché of perception about the sound of a tree falling in the forest without a witness is here transformed into a moral question: what is to be made of those who hear something terrible happening, and do not say anything?

The slow deliberate survey by the lens makes it seem as if a surveillance camera has been mounted in the wilderness. It sees everything, but does nothing. After the first tree sweeps across the frame in its surprise of motion, we are stunned into waiting for what we know must be the next. We never learn why they topple; there is no recording of an ax or a saw.

And once or twice we are tricked as, waiting for crash, a tree comes down without a sound, leaving what looks like a star fall of leaves bright in the sun, and dust making smoke of shafts of light.

In between, these woods are full of noises, like Prospero’s island in The Tempest. What we hear is wind or water or breathing. The subject is our own silence. The paradox of isolating frames from what is meant as a moving picture can have no better example. To use stills from this piece to illustrate it as is being done here is a special kind of misrepresentation. There are few films of my experience in which motion is so central simply because there is so little of it. The before and after of the collapse are absolutely continuous. There can be no preview clips here. We must have all or nothing.

In another part of the museum, several other works by Gersht are on exhibit, one a short film and the others individual photographs. One of those – a floral still life that is literally exploded – erases our fear of what is about to happen, leaving a climax of extinction, with no more to follow.

To come to the end of “The Forest,” we have to stop looking. A single flicker of vertical line marks the close of the quarter hour video loop. But it means nothing. There is no end to these woods. And no way out of them.

A festering of unnatural light around the corner from the exhibition entrance, the fluorescent wall is not glorious, but painful. There is no slant to the truth being told here; no “explanation kind,” as Emily Dickinson would have had it.

The other end of the metal-panelled cube is interrupted by a cut out of a portal with a thin line of red incandescence just inside. Unknowingly disobedient, entering, I slammed my knee against a bench hidden in the dark. The video was just coming to an end and the illuminated sign had been meant to warn me.

We are always being warned by Alfredo Jaar.

Biography as sculpture, the story is told here of Kevin Carter, photographer and suicide. At the center of the matter is a single image taken by him in the Sudan during the famine year of 1993. The paradox in writing the review is how much of the secret to keep about what that photograph depicts. To know what is coming – or not to know – give a difference to the waiting in the dark.

I knew, and waited for the picture to be shown, registering my memory of it against the darkness and the projected texts which describe it before it appears – and then vanishes in a slow moment.

Carter waited to click the shutter on this image. He hoped to see the wings of death’s angel come to make the picture perfect. But he took what he could get.

And as we watch what he saw, there is a machine hum that underscores the silence in the room rather than breaking it.

We have all looked at horrors like the one we are faced with here, usually while at the breakfast table, but always in comfort. As the exhibit recounts the story of a group of South African photographers with whom Carter began his work, it is established that:

“They witnessed too many murders.They survived too many murders.”

So have we all. But our survival comes at a price.

We come away blinded, literally, realizing that the bright outer wall of the installation is the flash of the camera in freeze frame. And we are too late. It is difficult to look at anything else in the exhibition, even Jaar’s reproductions of seventeen covers from Newsweek magazine of the period from the beginning of the Rwandan genocide in April of 1994 to the first appearance of that story on a cover in August of that year. In between, the periodical pictured other more suitable deaths – Kurt Cobain , Richard Nixon, Jacqueline Kennedy, O. J. Simpson’s wife. The irony of our indifference is rendered as a cliché which will inevitably be repeated. And in the film Maxima – Jaar’s travelogue of absences – with its amputee statues from a Colonial past , and six figures staring out to sea as if in vigil over memories of the Middle Passage – the vibrant music of the soundtrack can do nothing to erase all that we do not hear inside the bright box with that one photograph.

Whose silence is at issue here? And which? The silence then? Or the silence now?

In Carter’s photograph, there is a child – a daughter – whose fate we will never know. And there is the photograph of that child now among the images held in trust for Carter’s daughter, who survives him. Just one image among the millions licensed by Corbis and offered for sale. Jaar tells us that the horrors of our time will be fully recorded. He tells us that they will become commodities. He does not tell us that they will ever end.

Picturesque Crimes: The Paradox of Art about Slavery

[published November, 2007, New Haven Advocate]

A shackle can have the same geometry as a piece of silverware. They are both – strictly speaking – domestic appliances. An iron handcuff and a utensil for shaving sugar from the large blocks in which it was first made available for household use, paired in a display case. But is such a stark, recognizable irony all that we can experience of the presence that slavery once had at the dinner table?

“Art and Emancipation in Jamaica: Isaac Mendes Belisario and His Worlds” at the Yale Center for British Art until Dec 30(1080 Chapel Street, New Haven, 203-432-2800, www.yale.edu/ycba) is an exhibition that measures the limits of what can be known about the realities of a slave society, and is as important for what it cannot show as it is for what it does.

Drumming echoes at the entrance – accompanying video images from a contemporary Jamaican Jonkonnu Festival. Character studies from this carnival event were published by the artist Isaac Mendes Belisario in a series of early 19th century lithographs that form the visual center of the exhibit.

Belisario himself is largely a mystery – Jewish, born in Jamaica, grandson of a slave trader, he studied art in London. But he is a valuable accident. Whatever his reasons were for depicting – just prior to full emancipation of all slaves in 1838 – the masquerades performed by black Jamaicans at Christmas and New Year’s, the images carry messages he could not have read.

In the dancing is the threat. The master’s whip and the lady’s fan are taken up by figures who shift race and gender. The uniforms of the military occupation are turned into clown suits. And here are those same whiteface masks used a century and a half later by the Sandinista revolutionaries in Nicaragua, the oppressors besieged by their own caricatures.

And the music which accompanied these parades must have been a diaspora art like the Old Testament psalms of exile – the memory of what had been stolen now sung in the streets. Early published accounts on view here treat the musical instruments of the slaves as specimens from some alien environment, catalogued and illustrated alongside exotic reptiles and plants.

But these dances reclaim pain, as well. The exhibit includes a description of a slave ship, published in 1789 by a British abolitionist society,which points out – in a declaration of perfect sarcasm – that “the only exercise of the men-slaves is their being made to jump in their chains, and this, by their friends of the trade, is called dancing.”

The slaveholding class dances, too, in a 1802 engraving of “A Grand Jamaican Ball” with gossip and wine goblets large as buckets, a line of black servants, a portly colonial fondling a woman’s breasts in the balcony, and a rollicking cleric doing a Rockettes kick. Here is the sugar economy as comic grotesque, edging closer to the truth.

The island landscape paintings – several of them by Belisario – construct a propaganda of nature. Slavery is absorbed into the established order, a minor ornament to the plantations which are rendered as if they were Paradise under construction. When the slave rebellions come, the pastoral myth makers are shocked into adding flames to the scenery – like napalm igniting the tree line in a movie war.

But the individuals are lost in the mass of rebels, as they are in the widely circulated 18th century broadside that dissects a slave ship into cross sections, detailing the arrangement of human bodies for the most efficient use of every available space. Its horror is abstracted. What act of the imagination could render this silent miniature into a credible record of how those holds below decks must have sounded, what they smelt like?

William Blake – working on commission – engraves an image for a 1796 account of an expedition to suppress slave outbreaks in South America. “A Negro hung alive by the ribs to a gallows” portrays a Golgotha without redemption, a clear condemnation of all those authoritarian models – religious and secular – which Blake saw as defined by the denial of human freedom. But even here, the image serves only the artist’s outrage. The identity of the suffering figure is rendered unimportant.

Heavy with words, there is more of slavery in the scripts of this exhibition than in its images. Here are the inventory books of human property, distinguished as “cripple but willing,” or “able, but lazy.” A printed announcement of a slave auction notes the regional provenance of the assembled goods – a claim to quality like that of a museum catalogue. An 1832 record of court proceedings of “The King against James Goldworthy, slave,” details the charges of “rebellion, rebellious conspiracy, arson” and notes the punishment: “150 lashes" –a likely death penalty.

Everything written here requires patience, a pressing close to the glass to make words out of the pale script. These are horror’s small shadows inscribed upon ledger sheets – translucent and illegible. Locked in cabinets, there is the unavoidable cheat of pages which cannot be turned. It is the invisible story which tells us what we need to know.

What would it mean to curate our own country’s inheritance of slavery – its unconfronted racism – using the model offered in these galleries? How many warehouses would serve?

In the end, all I could do was to imagine the exhibition as I imagined myself, alone in the museum after closing, carrying a single candle from image to image, book to book, small light against the large darkness.

Matej Andraz Vogrincic, “Untitled (It used to be my playground)” Site Projects, New Haven, CT

Wearing a white linen suit, Theodore Roosevelt sits inside the metal cab of a steam shovel during his visit to the newly dug Panama Canal. The workers in the photograph hardly register – they are edges to the frame of the bright, imperious centerpiece. And those invisible men share their vanishing with the masons who fashioned the retaining walls which survive of the abandoned Farmington Canal in New Haven, Connecticut.

Their memory is not entirely restored in the site installation recently created for that space by Matej Vogrincic. Perhaps it could not be. Hard labor is transient. As material as the result may be, the actual physical cost is not a part of the reference we make when confronting it. Even the work of the artist on this particular piece – the logistics of clear cutting and trash removal; the heaping up of gravel and clam shells and bricks – is not self evident.

And while there may be photographs and film records of the work in progress, they are accidental histories which are not integral to the piece. The project might have struggled to completion, or have been laid out in a matter of moments. On the evidence of the site itself, there is no way of distinguishing.

Any work of art contains this paradox of hidden time; its illusion of the miraculous. But that does not mean that we should always be taken in. There is something about those 19th century ditch diggers that demands remembering in specific terms which this work can only partially grant. And the ranks of stone which they fitted together should be read as more than a convenient setting for a current fantasy.

While Vogrincic was drawn to this location by its past – a water transportation project of the early 1800’s which failed, later to be replaced by a railway line itself now obsolete – his excavation of the site (in which, for the sake of full disclosure, I was a sometime participant) did more to erase than expose. There were artifacts – from railway spikes to a frustrated thief’s laptop computer, but they were not a part of the artist’s anticipated story.

There is a pastiche working here, with the children’s Erector Sets of New Haven’s W.C. Gilbert Company serving as templates for the sinkable vessels filled with archetypes of cargo. But the sense of surprise at the center of Vogrincic’s earlier works – ranks of plaster watering cans in the Australian desert, or a Venetian house, its exterior walls covered with clothing – is muted here. The overturned boats with which he filled the bombed out shell of St. Luke’s Church in Liverpool evoked losses at sea and fishers of men precisely by being out of place. Here, the mock craft are predictable, not revelatory.

But this does not mean that the installation is powerless. A parenthesis to the untitled piece notes that “It used to be my playground.” But it was never a place for games. The punched-out metal forms that frame the boats have a malevolent shine to them. They are like Charon’s toys, meant for modern dead crowding into the underworld.

And the assembly line is evoked – not simply in the duplication of forms which Vogrincic has used previously – but in the briefly immobilized procession that has a touch of infinity lent to it by the open-mouthed darkness at either end of the canal’s length. There may be a sorcerer’s apprentice at work here – his magic run amuck – leaving us to face a threat both impassive and unstoppable.

For romantics, this is an ominous tunnel of love, inside which the lovers have jumped ship – victims of some accident of the hidden machinery or mutual suicides.

Beginning and end are unstable here – are the boats coming or going, in retreat or invading, bringing gifts or escaping with plunder? The ambiguity cancels out the cliché of the work, leaving us with our carefully considered fears of what lies underground. That may well serve as a witness to the diggers who originally made this space and the harm many of them must have come to. Their experience would have been close enough to damnation. As it must have been for the community of homeless who sheltered here this past winter. Standing on one of the bridges above the installation we look in vain for a coin slot that might click open a door to hell.

Can art change the world?[posted March 2007, Yale University Art Gallery]

“Into what?” might be the necessary appendix to the inquiry. The implied assumption that art by definition holds a preferable alternative to the current state of things is easily belied by the architecture of Albert Speer. Of course, that reference invites the logical evasion that Speer’s work is not actually art – if it were it would not have elevated the fascist worldview. And so, a question such as this can loop into hopelessness.

Let us frame it another way. What if it is art that keeps the world from changing absolutely...from letting madness have its way? The horror begins just where art ends. As the poet Diane DiPrima has pointed out, "the only war that matters is the war against the imagination." That war is being waged with a special – if not unprecedented – intensity in our own place and time. The ability to propose alternatives to the reality which established power presents as exclusive is always threatening. Art dismisses otherness when it is at is best – erasing the necessary enemies that institutionalized violence requires.

Torture’s failure to see itself for what it is finds its counter in Leon Golub’s Interrogation III where the naked, abused, blinded woman at its center has her humanity restored by the artist’s outrage. It reminds us that we are easily horrified in museums, while the artless cruelties of the news turn mundane around us.

Goya’s Los Desastres de la Guerra are unbearable, but they are not meant to simply document atrocities.The real paradox of horrors transformed into painting or sculpture or print is to not let the savagery be the last word. Equally absurd and joyous, that defiance belongs to art. What more can the world require of it, even if – in the end – there are only broken statues in the sand?

Moving Sculpture: What Can Happen When You Put Art In Its Place[published March, 2007, New Haven Advocate]

Like a back alley indoors, the corridor in the basement of the Yale Art Gallery that leads to the restored sculpture courtyard feels like a passage that you have wandered into by mistake— half private, half abandoned.

But there is nothing in it to prepare you for where it leads.

Richard Serra’s work Stacks— dispassionately described in the Gallery's language as "two rectangular steel masses, each 93 inches high x 96 inches wide x 10 inches deep," set "at an angle of 2.3 degrees from the vertical, centered on a long axis, and placed parallel to each other, sixty feet apart"—was originally installed in the sculpture hall of the gallery’s Swartwout building. That space, built in 1928, is immediately adjacent to the more recent gallery designed by Louis Kahn.

The title of Stacks was specific to the site, since the space had been used as a library during Serra’s days as a student at the Yale Art School. At the time of the sculpture’s installation—1990, just one year after the public furor that led to the destruction of Serra’s Tilted Arc, made for the Federal Plaza in New York—it was reported that Yale had a contractual arrangement with the artist regarding the work’s future. Stacks could be removed and placed in storage, but could not be reinstalled at any other location except its original one.

So what led the Yale, during the extensive renovations prior to its reopening last fall, to move Serra’s work to the sunken plaza on the west side of the Kahn building? And what made the artist agree to it?

For Jock Reynolds, Director of the Yale University Art Gallery, it was the alteration of the original site which made it inhospitable to Serra’s work. The introduction of a structural wall as part of an elevator housing at the far end of the Swartwout hall would have thrown off "the symmetry of the piece," he explained in a recent interview. Reynolds described Serra as having "gravitated instantly" to the suggestion of the new location with "assent and enthusiasm." For Reynolds, this was in part the result of Serra’s love for the architecture of Louis Kahn, as well as the artist’s having become "more flexible" in thinking about ways of locating (or relocating) his work.

Serra’s positive response was further confirmed by Jennifer Gross, Curator of Modern and Contemporary Art at the gallery, who described the artist as "thrilled" over the new setting, and added her own judgment that the move was "a happy thing."

While the artist himself, in a telephone conversation, used none of those particular adjectives, he was clear about his agreement with the change of site. The courtyard was "a place that needed to be used," according to Serra. His "respect for Kahn," and the architect’s notion that matter imposes itself upon form—a conclusion made clear in Serra’s own work—were also compelling reasons for the sculptor’s decision. Although he allowed that the nature of the piece had changed from one of "motion" at the original site (with openings at both ends of the long hall ) to one of "more stasis," this created in his mind an acceptable shift from a way of "passage" to one of "reflection and solitude."

But, almost in passing, Serra also noted that the piece would now have "a better chance of surviving." This seemed a curious comment given that large pieces of metal were being moved outdoors. Although the rusting of the Cor-ten steel will stabilize eventually, the surface of the forms will become something it never would have had it been left in its roofed hall.

There is another kind of preservation that the artist was thinking of. When Stacks was first proposed for Yale, the announcement was met with outrage over both its expense and its indoor site. Serra remembered this. There was never a threat equal to what Tilted Arc suffered, but the echo could hardly have been unnoticed.

As massive as it is, as long as it was inside there was a suggestion of the temporary about the piece. It could be moved. And so it was. But its present location is all about permanence—the last stop. The sculpture garden is no longer the shifting exhibition space it was conceived to be in the 1960s. There are archival photographs that show the courtyard with planters designed by Kahn and several abstract sculptures (one like a demented robot) placed within it.

Stacks is now sole resident in this geography – it is in absolute possession. No potted bamboo in the corners ever again. And no other art will ever edge its way in.

This is all reasonable enough. But I still carry the weight of my own encounters with the newly placed sculpture. This was not just a matter of shifting Michelangelo’s David indoors out of the acid rain. Being moved, this work has become something quite different from what it was.

There is nothing about the sculpture where it is now that declares it to be in the wrong place. No mistake has been made; the work has not been even partially erased in the way a fragment of a medieval altarpiece is, hung on a penthouse wall.

But to be in the right place is not always bearable. The sculpture has become awful, in the original sense of that word: all wonderment and fear.

When covering the Kahn building’s grand reopening, I described Stacks in its new location as "an execution ground." But there was more to that association than a generic reference. I came away from the space certain that I had seen it somewhere before. And I had.

At Auschwitz, there is a yard for a firing squad, enclosed on all four sides. At the far end of the space is a freestanding wall, lower and narrower than the one behind it, against which those who were to be murdered stood.

One cannot always choose one’s associations. They come, sometimes gnawing, as this one did. And Manet came, too, with that painter’s Execution of the Emperor Maximillian and its crowd leaning over a wall above the smoke from the soldiers’ rifles.

Serra remarked that his Stacks now "deals with the sky," but for me, that sky is over a prison exercise yard. Perhaps it would be a relief to describe the sculpture’s slightly canted slabs as the surface evidence of some giant machinery beneath, now briefly jammed. But the sense of alarm remains.

In spite of its creator’s declarations, this sculpture is a terrifying thing to be alone with, and reflecting in its presence would likely lead to one of Hamlet’s bad dreams. Since the press preview of the gallery’s reopening, when a small crowd was led swiftly in and out, I have yet to see another person inside the space. This may be merely a coincidence.

My last view of Stacks was through one of the narrow slits in the outer wall of the gallery, at street level. It looked like circle omitted from Dante’s map of hell – – the security camera, the patio of ice. It is extraordinary. But I do not want to go there again.